What is Umbraco?

You’ve decided your company needs a new website, but now you feel a little overwhelmed with all the CMS choices? Umbraco, Sitecore, Magento, even WordPress... there are lots of platforms that may be suitable for you.

But what is Umbraco, and why is it considered one of the best CMS platforms? Hopefully, this article will give you an insight into why it is one of the world’s most popular content management system (CMS) platforms.

Umbraco websites are open source, which means you don’t need to pay for a license. For some CMS solutions, you must pay for licenses (for example, Sitecore.) Here at CSI Media, we also develop websites on the WordPress and Sitecore CMS platforms. Whilst these platforms do serve a purpose - and your decision needs to consider multiple factors (your requirements, budget), Umbraco’s flexibility over design, functionality, integrations and content management make it arguably the best CMS solution for most businesses.

We need to be clear about this. Umbraco does need experienced web designers to ensure that your website is designed to accommodate the latest web standards, whether they’re in-house or at an agency. However, the flexibility over design makes it a great platform - with Umbraco, you can achieve pretty much any look and feel and of course, most agencies will encourage open dialogue and collaboration on the design, to make sure it meets your requirements.

This is one of our latest Umbraco web designs…

With Umbraco, the possibilities really are endless, the only restriction is budget… Umbraco can be integrated with pre-existing e-commerce, CRM and logistical systems for seamless processes between business functions. Furthermore, custom solutions can be built within Umbraco, whatever your requirements are.

Personalisation is a clever feature that dynamically presents content based on a user’s ‘profile’. The system will automatically choose which content to present to a user dependent on lots of criteria including user location, referral URL (where the user has visited from) or the completion of a specific action on your website. This functionality can be applied to any area of your website from landing pages, deals' pages, offers, news articles, blog posts and FAQs.

Finally, Umbraco websites are fast. Fast page-loading times are essential for websites that want to keep visitors engaged, and the content cache boosts the performance of sites to ensure your visitors don't get tired waiting for pages to load.

Here at CSI Media, we develop websites that deliver an outstanding user experience for your users. But we also want you to have the ability to easily update content on your website, which is why Umbraco is one of our favourite CMS platforms. Umbraco websites are powerful and flexible, and the platform allows us to create any website that you want.