CMS and Umbraco: what you need to know

Freshwater's website development team guides us through the reasons why we should all know about content management systems (CMS) and why open-source software programme, Umbraco, does the job nicely for us.

What is a CMS?

First things first, let’s address the lingo. A CMS is, in short, a software apparatus for creating, editing, and publishing content online.

Content management systems have become an increasingly important tool to the everyday life of website content managers and are hugely beneficial to web developers.

What are the benefits of having a CMS?

The perfect web CMS has an easy-to-manage structure after the website has gone live and has an intuitive user interface (UI) for building and modifying content.

Being able to edit and update the website whenever you like means that your content managers have complete control and flexibility over their online material.

A CMS efficiently allows multiple users to publish updates live on the site, at the same time.

The editing element – or content management application (CMA) – and the publishing tool – content delivery application (CDA) – integrate effectively to streamline web development.

What are the benefits of using Umbraco as a CMS?

Our content managers and developers enjoy using Umbraco for their website projects, here are a few reasons why:

Benefits to content managers

The UI is simple, clean and intuitive with clear sections that are identified by distinctive icons.

With templates and stylesheets pre-created by the development team, adding content is simply adding a new page and populating in a visual way, without HTML codes. It has the user-friendly nature of using Microsoft Office programs such as Word.

The diverse media library means no more fussing with reformatting of images, videos, PDFs, GIFs etc. as Umbraco adapts the material for you and shows you a list of previews to choose from.

Catering to the mobile-optimised age, Umbraco cleverly allows the user to check the webpage ahead of publishing in various formats – showing previews of how the page will look on desktop, laptop, tablet and mobile.

Benefits to developers

Written in .Net, Umbraco has been produced with all of the benefits you would expect from a multi-thousand pound CMS, but without the price tag.

Its clever design makes it streamline and slick while keeping it highly extensible.

With the various extension points and excellent online community support, almost anything is possible.

Like WordPress, there are a vast array of plugins already built and if you can’t find one that suits your needs, you can just build your own.

Umbraco’s permissions feature allows control of other users. For example, from something as simple as who can publish a post to making sure that those unconfident on the technical side cannot reach any of the coding.

Umbraco is ridiculously flexible. If we want Umbraco to do something, most of the time, it’s possible.

Developers have the ability to deliver a truly bespoke and streamlined website with Umbraco – and it’s still a simple to use CMS. Top marks from us!

Freshwater’s team of Umbraco certified developers, create websites and digital content for clients across the UK. For more information on how we can help with your business’s digital needs, contact our creative media production team via hello@freshwater-uk.com or call 0800 111 4732.