Today, we are talking about one that doesn’t get as much attention as it should. And that platform is Umbraco. We are sitting down with three of our experts--Chad Donnick, Technology Director; Lauren Groh, Application Developer; and Brian Brown, Senior Application Developer--to discuss more about this platform and why it may be a smart choice for your business.
Let's start with why is Ascedia adding Umbraco as a CMS option for our clients vs. another platform?
Chad:
We play to our strengths. Umbraco is a .NET-based CMS, which is the primary programming language. It's what we've built our team around for 20+ years – to work in the .NET space. As a team, we have decades of experience with .NET, so having an opportunity to work with another .NET-based CMS like Umbraco just makes sense for us.
One of the goals we have at Ascedia is to deliver solutions with speed and efficiency. We want them to exceed client expectations so, we aim to be masters of a select few platforms rather than just being average at numerous platforms.
We’ve previously talked about Kentico as our primary .NET-based CMS solution. We have a decade-plus of Kentico experience as an agency and we wanted to expand. While we have worked with Umbraco in the past, there's been great improvements to the product over the years, so we've really gotten on board with it and have introduced that as another option. We consider Umbraco a lighter-weight, less expensive .NET-based CMS option for clients. It’s an alternative to something like WordPress. We have a large team of developers who work in the .NET space and have a desire to continue to work in this space.
Brian:
I want to jump in on that. One of the first things I noticed about Umbraco is the community support.
It’s active and it’s deep. It makes it easy for a developer to pick up, implement, and understand what you're doing. I was surprised. I came in thinking, oh, man, I haven't worked in Umbraco in forever, I’m not going to remember anything. But I picked it up right away. The support made relearning easy.
Lauren:
You pretty much-covered everything I had. Drupal and WordPress are both based on PHP. Much of our work is done in the .NET world so it made Umbraco the easy choice.
Ok, there’s a vibrant and active Umbraco community out there, that’s awesome, but I’m a client and I want to know why I should consider Umbraco?
Chad:
Totally get it. Look the majority of clients we partner with don't care what technology stack these CMSs are built on. What they do care about is usability. That is how easy is it for editors to manage the content they want to manage? What we do at Ascedia is work with CMSs that make it easy for editors to go in and manage, and Umbraco does this. We think that the overall user experience is intuitive to learn, but what it comes down to is less about the CMS specifically and more about how the CMS is built and implemented.
What I’m hearing as selling points are the following: Umbraco is easy to use for developers, it’s easy to use for editors, and it’s .NET – a platform we are familiar with and have the developers on staff. Do I have that right?
Chad:
You got it. We know not all clients are going to fit into the Kentico mold. Kentico is great for a lot of organizations. But maybe not a good fit for others.
There are a lot of organizations out there that need just standard content management, nothing fancy. For those, we now have a .NET option. And given that we have seven developers on staff that are trained and experienced in .NET we can move fast to get a site up and running.
Now that you’ve gone through the training, what stands out about Umbraco?
Brian:
As I mentioned, the community is a big plus and it’s user-friendly. What I like is that it has the touches of old Kentico and the newer Kentico feel, so it didn’t take long to get familiar with developing in Umbraco.
Lauren what about you?
Lauren:
I agree with Brian, the community is just awesome. I had one or two questions about a project so, I shot them out to the community and I was able to quickly get answers and resolve the problem. Plus, the documentation on Umbraco is vast. There's just so much out there. There are comment threads for every problem you could run into. So it's easy to develop in Umbraco because you've seen someone already go through the same problem and you can easily find your answer. And finally, from the customer standpoint, it's customizable, which is a big plus.
When a client comes on board with us, how do we determine the right CMS for them? I know some of this will be based on budget, but take that out of the mix for now.
Chad:
It starts with the complexity of the requirements. In other words, what is the client looking for? Is this a marketing-centric website with static pages that the client will be updating from time to time? Will the site have a simple Contact Us form and not much more beyond that?
If that's the case, then WordPress, or Umbraco, are both going to get the job done. How you choose between the two of them, in my opinion, is largely based on what the client is looking for as far as a timeline.
We can build in Umbraco in two months because we have 6 developers. Currently, our WordPress team is very busy with other projects so a new site will take a little longer.
If the client needs more of a digital experience platform – something that's going to offer more marketing automation, has advanced workflows built in, and has versioning built in-- a client is going to need a more robust CMS like Kentico. The bottom line with all this is that it's very situational and depends on the goals of the client. It is worth pointing out that Ascedia can provide support by helping a client select the right CMS, a CMS that is not only based on where they are currently with their business…but where they want to be in the future.
One of the big advantages of WordPress is the number of plugins they have. Does Umbraco have plugins as well?
Brian:
They do, only Umbraco calls them packages. They have a large library of packages that can be installed. WordPress has a pretty ridiculous amount of packages/plugins, but Umbraco has hundreds that can be used.
So it sounds like Umbraco could be a very nice fit for a lot of organizations out there, plus once the site is built the client won’t have to call us every time they want to make a change. Do I have that right?
Chad:
That’s right, when we build a site, there’s next to nothing we have to do with it -- aside from some small maintenance. Beyond that, there's little we have to do. Adding Umbraco into our mix is another tool in our toolbelt that I believe could benefit a lot of businesses in need of a new website.
