Certified Umbraco Developer

Certified Umbraco Developer - Simon Steed

Umbraco is an open source publishing platform for the .NET framework. Fast, flexible and incredibly powerful - arguably the finest CMS platform available for .NET.

Used by some of the worlds biggest brands such as Heinz, Sony and Warner Brothers, Umbraco is simple enough to power the smallest of websites and powerful and flexible enough to drive some of the worlds biggest.

The open source licensing of Umbraco means that more of your budget can be spent on features that matter rather than extortionate license fees and the support community around Umbraco is vast and unrivalled.

Simon Steed has been writing websites using Umbraco since 2009 and became a Certified Umbraco Developer in early 2011.

Umbraco Certified Developer Simon Steed Manchester

As an Umbraco Certified Developer, Simon is often called upon by other digital agencies around the country looking for his expertise in this area. Umbraco is Simon's platform of choice for all his development work.

You can view many of the sites that Simon has been involved with by clicking this link

In early 2011, Simon became an official Certified Umbraco Developer, and to prove it works well, this entire site is powered by Umbraco.

Umbraco is an open source .NET content management system used by major brands worldwide. It has enormous flexibility over other CMS systems available on the market and Umbraco now is a market leader in it's own right

If you are looking for Umbraco development resource for new or existing Umbraco websites, large or small - feel free to get in touch to discuss availability and rates. We can offer hourly, daily or project based rates to suit your Umbraco development needs

What is the Umbraco CMS?

Umbraco is an open source content management system (CMS) platform for publishing content on both websites and intranets with ease.

We have been using it for around two years now and Simon himself became an Umbraco Certified Developer in early 2011. What does this mean? Well basically he has been trained by Umbraco to use their CMS in the most effective way possible that allows us to cut the time to market for new websites quite considerably. As only Umbraco themselves provide the training courses, you can be sure that they ensure that Certified Umbraco Developers get the support and recognition they deserve to support their clients.

So what does it do?

Well, here is what's written on the CodePlex Site..

"For the first time on the Microsoft platform a free user and developer friendly cms (Content Management System) that makes it quick and easy to create websites - or a breeze to build complex web applications. Umbraco got award-winning integration capabilities and supports your ASP.NET User and Custom Controls out of the box. It's a developers dream and your users will love it too. Used by more than 70,000 active websites including Heinz.com, Peugeot.com, NAIAS.com and Microsoft's documentinteropinitiative.org website you can be sure that the technology is proven, stable and scales."
And here is what Umbraco say themselves (technophobes be aware!)..

"Who would believe that there would be an open source CMS based on Microsoft's ASP.NET? A CMS that can support any modern browser and that even allows editing with Microsoft Word. One where designers can create accessible and valid xhtml with their mark-up left intact. Where developers can integrate any .NET based control right out of the box. If someone tells you "won't happen", then they have never used umbraco..."

So in short:

Around 100,000 sites now running the Umbraco CMS
A mixture of websites (heinz.com, takethat.com, simonantony.net, avecto.com) and intranets / internal sites utilise Umbraco to serve their users with relevant content.
It allows the end user, i.e. you the client to easily manage your content without getting a developer involved once the site is running
You can if you wish use Microsoft Word to publish content to your site
You can do in browser editing or you can log into the Umbraco CMS backend and edit from there

Some cool features not mentioned above:

It supports multi-lingual websites. Even if your original site was only written in English, it's a straight forwards process to add another language to it i.e. German for instance
It's free, it's Open Source. Now runs on the new Microsoft Azure - it's Cloud Ready!
The editor section is stunningly simple to use
There is version control so you can rollback to previous versions of a page - out of the box
You can schedule your content to appear at specific times/dates with ease - why not pre-load your site with blog articles and allow Umbraco to automatically publish them at times you set?
It has workflow and event tracking built in - this allows for complex tasks to be easily integrated with your site

Knowledge Base Backend

Simple Editor

The Umbraco editor has been designed to be as simple as possible to use. You will instantly feel familiar with the toolbars and buttons. The intention when it was written was to remove the complexities associated with many other CMS out there.

You are focussing upon your content rather than how it will be displayed. You can choose to show the same content in different ways by the use of templates.

Versioning

How many times have you found content being overwritten, and wished you could undo the recent changes? Well with Umbraco, it's just a simple case of right click on the page you wish to restore, select the previous content and publish it - job done, Simple, just like it should be!

Scheduling of content

Wouldn't it be nice for you to tell Umbraco when to publish your content? Well using the built in Scheduler, you can do exactly this. Set a time/date when you save your content and when the time comes, Umbraco will automatically publish your content for you.

Hey we could even ask it to email you when this happens so you know! Simple and Efficient.

Umbraco Community - link http://our.umbraco.org

The Umbraco community is immense and just a hive of buzzing activity. One of the benefits this gives clients is a continuous innovation this brings along with the collective knowledge base which is expanding all the time. No matter what the problem, there is always a solution that can be bolted onto Umbraco to provide the functionality the client needs.

Umbraco Packages - link http://our.umbraco.org/projects

Umbraco Packages (or modules to others) are simply bolt on goodies of pre-written logic and code that provide specific functionality. Here are a selection of some key Umbraco Packages:

FAQ Module
SEO
Image manipulation
Complete site starter kits
Text searches
Workflow Managers
Secure file downloads
Synchronisation utilities
Blog Engines
Twitter and Facebook integration
+ many many more

Summary

As you can see, with Umbraco, you get a lot of bang for your buck. Interested in finding out more? Speak to Simon Antony to see how we can help your website visions become a reality.

Simon Antony ---- who?