Why Umbraco CMS is our platform of choice

Choosing the right content management system (CMS) for your new website is crucial for its success. You need to be able to upscale your site easily, it needs to support the media and content you want to showcase, and it needs to collect the user data that matters for your digital strategies. And maintaining it needs to be as smooth and painless as possible. It’s not a choice to make lightly.

The CMS we choose to use to build our digital platforms is Umbraco. With it, we’ve delivered one success story after another, giving us a long list of satisfied clients to brag about, including DStv, Connected Conservation and Sithabile Technology Services. There’s plenty of good reasons for that, which we can sum up in six points, starting with the most important, the fact that…

1. Umbraco is open source

While others take the proprietary route of protecting their code, Umbraco CMS is a completely open book. There are extensive advantages for us as a result, and a constant progression as others build on it and push the platform further. Content remains portable, customisation opportunities abound, and system impairments are minimised.

Security is a major concern for modern businesses and rightly so, but the notion that proprietary software is inherently more secure is a myth that too many buy into. Umbraco has over 200 000 developers across the globe who constantly share information about vulnerabilities and ensure they’re dealt with quickly and effectively.

Add-ons and packages are freely accessible, allowing anyone to extend its functionality in all sorts of ways. And while proprietary CMS platforms require every user to obtain a developer license, there’s no charge for onboarding with Umbraco. This also makes it ideal for training new developers and upskilling more experienced ones.

2. Umbraco is completely customisable

Whether the goal is to establish a brand as an industry leader, anchor a new sales strategy, or deliver a seamless cross-platform user experience, Umbraco allows us to deliver the goods. We’re limited only by our imaginations. This is because the open-source platform affords us endless customisation opportunities thanks to its seamless integration with any martech, CRM or e-commerce platforms.

There are no built-in integrations restricting users’ choices and Umbraco adds no code into the page’s source, meaning the code in our projects was all written by us. That makes it much quicker and simpler to locate bugs and resolve them.

3. Umbraco offers powerful yet user-friendly functionality

You’d be forgiven for thinking that all this customisability and advanced functionality would make it complicated for users, but far from it. Umbraco uses an input system that ensures an intuitive user experience for content managers, with no programming knowledge required.

Users have automated control of when campaigns begin and end, even across multiple time zones, thanks to its content scheduling feature. Furthermore, users can “undo” content changes – something that would fall to an experienced developer with most proprietary CMS platforms.

4. Support is collaborative and always on-hand

The community of developers that has formed around Umbraco CMS are a pretty close group, hence the tagline “the friendly CMS”. This means there’s a pool of developers willing to offer their insight, put their heads together and propose solutions to problems in real-time.

We can then fix the source of the problem ourselves (being open source) and get the platform up and running again without waiting on a small in-house support team. Umbraco will vet our solution and include it in the next update, allowing everyone to benefit.

5. It offers sophisticated SEO controls

Getting those all-important leads and converting them through your site helps to have solid SEO, and Umbraco allows us to offer clients a range of features for SEO optimisation. These include global settings, page settings, canonical tags, XML sitemap, and open graph protocol (allowing any webpage to become a rich object in a social graph to make sharing content on social media easy and trackable).

6. It’s an award-winning CMS

We take pride in being able to give our clients innovations, cutting-edge technology and the best resources available. Umbraco is unique in its ability to help us do that, and the awards it holds prove this.

In 2020, Umbraco won three separate awards, including:

• Visual Studio Magazine’s 2020 Reader’s Choice Awards – Gold in the Content Management System category
• DIGITALEUROPE – Future Unicorn Award
• CMS Critic Awards – Best Enterprise CMS

To further illustrate Umbraco’s market-leading capabilities and the edge that it affords our clients, the website we built for Internet Solutions won three silver awards at the 13th Annual W3 Awards.

If you’d like to learn more about the powerful, results-driven digital platforms that you could be using to meet your business goals and unlock growth, take a look at what we can do in terms of digital platforms.