A Complete Guide to Umbraco CMS

What is Umbraco CMS?

The Umbraco content management system (CMS) is a popular, user-friendly open source CMS system, built on the .net framework and used around the world to create websites and publish online content. 

The Umbraco CMS runs on Microsoft infrastructure, and its flexible features and growth capabilities mean it is used by small and medium enterprises, right up to global companies such as Johnnie Walker, McDonalds and Mercedes Benz.

An extended explanation can be found in this blog: What is Umbraco?

Why You Should Consider Using Umbraco CMS

Flexibility

Umbraco is a highly flexible CMS that can adapt to the requirements of different types of site. Some other CMS’ can be limiting however this is not the case with Umbraco. Your website can be completely customised to deliver exactly what you want and your developers can have full control over output and data. 

Design without Constraints

If a site can be built using HTML, CSS and JavaScrip, it can be managed by Umbraco.  There’s no inflexible design templates that constrain the design and look of the site. This means something beautifully bespoke, and highly effective, can be created for your business. 

Integrates well with MarTech tools

Having an effective website is just one key component of achieving your business and marketing goals. However, an effective website that also integrates with your MarTech tools can be gold. Umbraco CMS easily integrates with a wide range of tools (Link - https://skrift.io/issues/umbraco-tools-for-marketers/)  that can allow marketers to generate valuable data and insights to make better decisions. 

Other Benefits of Umbraco CMS 

• Fast effective, site search 
• Grid based editing
• Multilingual support 
• SEO Friendly URLs
• Easy editing for users  

You can find out more about the key features of the Umbraco CMS system here.

4 Most Important Things to Know About Umbraco CMS

Umbraco CMS is Easy to Use 

Using the Umbraco CMS system, non-technical users can edit and manage website content without the help of a developer, or any prior coding knowledge.

Known for its user friendliness, the Umbraco CMS makes it easy for editors to manage content, schedule your content to be published and unpublished on a date in the future, and save drafts with ease. 

Should you take a mis-step, Umbraco has a full audit trail allowing you to quickly and easily roll back to infinite previous versions, and a recycling bin for content elements which may have accidentally been deleted. 

Umbraco’s intuitive design and usability means content managers can preview their content on multiple devices instantly, build forms and questionnaires without any coding, crop images at the touch of a button, and manage multi-language content with ease.

Umbraco CMS is Open Source

The open source set up of Umbraco means it is completely customisable, meaning it can be edited to fit the style and brand guide of any business. The wide range of functionalities, templates and bolt-ons available mean Umbraco websites can quickly and easily be adapted to fit any type of site from reference, to eCommerce, and everything in between. 

The large Umbraco community have great communications with Umbraco themselves, resulting in a CMS which is constantly having new features added and current features being improved. Issues and glitches are quickly picked up and fixes are implemented as soon as possible. 

Umbraco CMS is Easy to Use 

Using the Umbraco CMS system, non-technical users can edit and manage website content without the help of a developer, or any prior coding knowledge. 

Known for its user friendliness, the Umbraco CMS makes it easy for editors to manage content including publishing directly from Microsoft Word, schedule your content to be published and unpublished on a date in the future, and save drafts with ease. 

Should you take a mis-step, Umbraco has a full audit trail allowing you to quickly and easily roll back to infinite previous versions, and a recycling bin for content elements which may have accidentally been deleted. 

Umbraco’s intuitive design and usability means content managers can preview their content on multiple devices instantly, build forms and questionnaires without any coding, crop images at the touch of a button, and manage multi-language content with ease.

Umbraco CMS is Secure 

Umbraco is a highly secure CMS. Their teams carry out regular internal testing, third party companies carry out regular penetration testing, and the Umbraco community report any vulnerabilities they find which are acted upon quickly, and in order of importance.  

As part of regular housekeeping, Umbraco strip out old, unused code to help minimise risk. 

Other Umbraco security features include:

• Automated security updates (Umbraco Cloud) 
• Automated HTTPS certificate (Umbraco Cloud) 
• Hashed passwords 
• Support for HTTPS 
• Support for OAuth login system 
• Possible to set-up password rules 
• Ability to implement two-factor authentication 
• Default log-out of back end when periodically inactivity  
• Regular built-in CMS and Cloud security checks 

By using Microsoft infrastructure, the Umbraco CMS system also benefits from security features associated with the Microsoft stack.

There is a Headless Option Too 

A headless CMS is a back end only content management system which sends your content as data through an API. Think of the back end repository ad the ‘body’, and the website or platform where content appears as the ‘head’. While Umbraco’s core CMS isn’t headless, Umbraco Heartcore is meaning businesses have options depending on their needs. 

 

Umbraco Case Studies

Umbraco CMS is used by companies of all shapes and sizes from various verticals such as legal firms to ecommerce sites. Carbon Six Digital’s clients come from the education and learning sector, not-for-profit and charity sector, ecommerce and financial services to name but a few. 

Find out how Carbon Six Digital have helped create reliable, high performing websites by reading just some of our Umbraco case studies. 

 

Getting Started with Umbraco CMS

Umbraco offer a range of tools, tutorials and documentation for you to start using their CMS straight away. The ‘Create a Basic Site’ tutorial provides step by step instructions to help you build your first site. Alternatively, you can find instructional videos on YouTube. 

In reality, most business owners do not have the time to learn how to build a site from scratch, use APIs and get to know the finer points of their CMS system. To get the best from Umbraco in a shorter space of time, they most often employ an Umbraco development agency to take care of things for them. If you’re not starting from scratch and want to learn how you can maximise performance from your Umbraco CMS, you may want to talk to an agency about getting a site healthcheck performed. 

Hiring an Umbraco development agency means employing experts who have the knowledge and experience to get the best from the Umbraco CMS system and build a custom site with great functionality and UX. 

Choosing which agency to work with can be a minefield, here are six key elements to look for when choosing your agency: 

• Do they have demonstrable experience of using Umbraco such as case studies and testimonials? 
• Do they understand how and why things may go wrong while working on an Umbraco project?
• Do they have certifications to show they understand Umbraco best practice?
• Do they have a close working relationship with Umbraco HQ?
• Do they use functionality packages and toolkits?
• Are they able to support your site as it scales? 

You can find out more about things to consider when choosing your Umbraco agency here.

A Marketer’s Guide to Inheriting an Umbraco CMS 

Marketers or Heads of Digital in a business are likely to be the people using Umbraco on a daily basis to make changes and add content for example.

If you want to get to grips with Umbraco, why not download our practical guide to inheriting and using an Umbraco CMS. 

Partner with an Umbraco Gold Partner Agency 

Helpfully, Umbraco offer a status to agencies which pass rigorous testing, called Umbraco Gold Partner status. By hiring an Umbraco Gold Partner, you are guaranteed a well-versed an technically experienced team. Gold Partners also hold benefits for clients that non-Gold Partner agencies do not have access to, such as add-ons, plug-ins and early access to new tools and patches.  

You can find out more about why you should hire an Umbraco Gold Partner here.

Alternatives to Umbraco CMS

There are a number of alternatives to Umbraco CMS, each of which have their own strengths and weaknesses. For example, you may wish to consider a well-known platform such as WordPress; a highly flexible and easy to use web builder, but  which is not headless, and is prone to spam and security issues. Other alternatives include Drupal, Sitecore and Episerver. 

Umbraco offers features and benefits which the Umbraco community believe makes it a superior platform, helping your content manages work more efficiently, productively, and securely. 

Umbraco vs Wordpress 

Wordpress is by a long margin the most used CMS in the world.  We think that a well built Wordpress site can be an effective marketing tool, however there are many sites that are built using Wordpress which are complicated to use, inflexible in their design, formulaic and ultimately provide poor return on investment.

Umbraco sites tend to start from a blank slate in terms of their design, and are less likely to be formulaic and inflexible.  Furthermore, a well built Umbraco site can be extremely easy to manage, and to integrate with other tools in your MarTech stack. You can learn more about the differences between Umbraco and WordPress here. 

Umbraco vs Sitecore and Umbraco vs Episerver 

Umbraco, Sitecore and Episerver all share a common technology platform, being built on the the Microsoft .NET technology stack.  Therefore they each lend themselves well to businesses with a substantial investment in Microsoft Technologies and a IT team well skilled in the Microsoft stack.  

For a small number of larger businesses, a case can be made for the strength of Personalisation in Sitecore, or E-commerce in Episerver, however this needs to be balanced against the substantial cost involved in both platforms.

Licensing costs for Sitecore are in the Tens of Thousands of Pounds and for Episerver can be in the Hundreds of Thousands.  Compare this against the free nature of Umbraco, and the business case needed to justify the costs of Episerver and Sitecore can be difficult for SME and even Mid-Market organisations to make.

Further reading on Umbraco CMS

If you would like to find out more about the Umbraco CMS system have a look through our Insights section where you can find informative guides, whitepapers, posts, case studies and more. 

If you’d like to dive into the more technical aspects of Umbraco you can visit their website.

If you’d like to find out how Umbraco could be used for your project, arrange a call with our friendly Umbraco experts.