So, you've decided you want to update or redesign your website. As you shop around for a content management system (CMS), you want to make sure to choose one that's easy to update, well-designed, flexible, and offers an unbeatable user experience. Let us save you some soul searching and introduce you to a friendly CMS. Meet Umbraco.
What is Umbraco?
Let's start with the basics. Umbraco is an open source (free) .NET content management system that offers great flexibility and extensive capabilities. More than 500,000 websites are built with Umbraco, ranging from international brands like Heinz and Vogue to small businesses like Timco Rubber and NOPEC.
How Does Umbraco work?
When you log into Umbraco, there's almost nothing the average user can't do. Umbraco offers greater functionality and user experience when it comes to building and designing pages and creating content. When building or redesigning a website, designers and developers can define the building blocks of your website on the back end to ensure it has the right look and feel of your company without having to fiddle around with HTML.
From there, you can build forms and add, edit, and delete pages as you grow your business and hone your online strategy.
Why Choose Umbraco?
Umbraco is often compared to WordPress, as they both allow you to create, edit, delete, and schedule content. They also have similar features like user roles, multilingual capabilities, mobile preview, and version history/rollback. But we believe Umbraco is better. Here's why.
Security and integration features
Umbraco uses Microsoft's .NET framework, making it one of the most secure and powerful platforms available. Because of this, Umbraco integrates extremely well with third party systems, like your CRM or ERP. Umbraco also offers a wide range of admin access roles to easily manage and control what your users' can and can't do.
Customization
Because Umbraco is open source, there are hundreds of plugins available, making it a highly customizable CMS. With Umbraco, you'll get access to more than 300 free plugin extensions ready to download and use. Similar to the app store on your smartphone, these extensions have all been verified and can be easily installed by a developer with just a single click.
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SEO
Umbraco sites typically don't take as much time to load as WordPress sites, as they're more lightweight. Since many WordPress sites rely on a slew of plugins to function properly, it can slow down the site considerably. As a result, Umbraco pages can perform better in search engines, as there's less plugins for the browser to load.
Short learning curve
Once your site is developed, your copywriters, content managers, and marketers need to be able to easily publish, edit, and delete content.
Umbraco's page builder allows you to create complex page layouts without any HTML coding or WYSIWYG page editors by selecting from a list of "building block" components. From there, you just add words, pictures, videos, forms, you name it. Umbraco even automatically generates all the right image sizes, so you won't have to crop or size images in Photoshop.
When you go to publish, you can preview the content on different devices and even schedule it to go live on a set date and time. If you choose to move, rename, or delete a page, creating a 301 redirect is a simple and easy task.
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Get Started With Umbraco
Here at Aztek, we're big fans of Umbraco. As a registered Umbraco partner, our web design and development team uses Umbraco for all kinds of projects. We've even developed a starter kit to make sure we can give our clients access to all the innovative features we've built, which means you'll get more features and value out of your new CMS with us. Thanks to Umbraco, we’re able to offer more custom functionality, a better user experience, and a faster turnaround time for our clients.
Whether you're redesigning your website like Hurst Remodel, starting from scratch like Matrix Trade Institute, or trying to build your own thermocouple, talk to us today to see how we can improve your online presence with Umbraco. We'd be happy to give you a demo and answer any other questions you may have.
