5 Reasons To Choose Umbraco CMS

Choosing a CMS for your website is an important, yet sometimes difficult decision to make. You want your website to align with your business goals, while creating an engaging, visually appealing, and user-friendly website.

While there are a lot of content management systems to choose from, Marcel Digital typically recommends the Umbraco CMS due to its user-friendliness, customization possibilities, and scalability to meet business needs. It is also Microsoft’s #1 .NET open source CMS platform, so there are no ongoing license fees and can be managed by any .NET developer or development team. Follow along as we go through why we love Umbraco CMS - and why you should too.

1. Ease of Use

There is a reason why Umbraco’s tagline is “The Friendly CMS”. Umbraco was built specifically with the purpose of making it easy to update your website. Many content management systems can be clunky and difficult to navigate. Umbraco, however, is centered around creating an incredible user experience, both on the front-end and the back-end, ensuring both editors and users enjoy seamless website experiences.

Umbraco provides many features for editors to make updates on the website:

Content block editor. Easily update individual content blocks on a page and rearrange them as needed. The drag and drop functionality allows users to pull in necessary content blocks without the need for a developer.

Page templates. After a page has been built utilizing the block editor, users can quickly create page templates to be re-used as needed. This is great for product/service pages, landing pages, and resource pages.

Image editor. Easily change the focal point of an uploaded image to showcase the best part of an image. Even swap out the focal point case-by-case depending on how it is used on the site.

SEO features. Quickly swap out page titles and meta descriptions, as well as follow and canonical options to give your SEO team full control.

User permissions & publishing options. Umbraco gives you full control over granting specific access to editors and user groups. This means giving the right permissions to the right users without worrying about micromanaging or arduous approval processes.

Integrated Form Builders. Umbraco has powerful, out-of-the-box form functionality to ensure you are creating simple forms and workflows for your needs.

Multilingual Support. If your site needs multiple languages, you need an easy way to add and manage translations. Umbraco makes it easy to translate pages and set up an approval process for publishing. You can even create permissions around what needs to be translated before publishing to ensure pages can or cannot be published without a translation if needed.

2. It’s Completely Customizable

Umbraco is built to be customizable. Many content management systems put you into a box. You play by their rules, even if their rules don’t fit your workflows. Umbraco is open-sourced, meaning the source code of Umbraco is available to anyone, so a development resource can update and customize the user experience and functionality your website (and your workflow) requires.

By using Umbraco, you can think about how you would like to work, rather than how you have to work. The CMS can be personalized in incredible ways by a skilled developer, but can also be used out of the box to create incredible website content, page layouts, and templates.

For example, content blocks can be customized to show your editors how specific content elements will look before selecting them. These libraries can be used by your editors to quickly find appropriate content blocks to insert into a page.

Don’t worry if you don’t have a web development or web design team– a handful of 3rd party resources, such as uSkinned, offer pre-built themes and page components to help you get your website up and running quickly and easily.

3. It’s Easy to Create A Seamless Experience For All Devices

Having a website with a responsive design, is one of the most important features to guarantee a great user experience. 83% of mobile users say that a seamless web experience across multiple devices is very important to them. These numbers are so telling that in 2015 Google made mobile-friendliness a ranking factor, requiring all websites to maintain an optimized mobile experience in order to keep their mobile rankings and organic visibility.

Responsive design means building your site in such a way that your website responds automatically to different screen sizes, changing the layout of the page based on the device the user happens to be using.

Umbraco has responsive design integrated into its platform, allowing you to create your website layout to fit numerous screen sizes. It’s built with the user in mind, so editors can be certain of how their site looks and reacts no matter the device.

The CMS even allows you to preview your content on multiple screens/devices before publishing to ensure the layout is optimized for your users. See what your page looks like on a mobile device, laptop, or a desktop and make adjustments as needed before going live.

4. The Community Is Amazing

Umbraco has one of the most incredible communities in the world. Why does that matter to you? Because a team of incredibly passionate developers are constantly working on making Umbraco better. This means better features dreamed up by people who know and love the friendly CMS.

Learning about Umbraco is easy. Check out a video Umbraco demo or the Umbraco community support forum, which is a fantastic resource for developers and users alike.

With the dedicated community of Umbraco, you’re getting consistent updates to the platform and more brains to create more incredible offerings.

5. It Works Great For Integrations

Umbraco is meant to be a best-in-class content management system. As such, it is built to integrate with other systems to give you seamless integration to your most important business tools.

By integrating these tools into your CMS, you ensure your website works seamlessly with your sales and marketing tools to deliver the best experience for your users and your editors. It will also ensure the website creates efficiencies with your internal processes instead of roadblocks.

Umbraco works great with CRMs such as:

• Salesforce
• Hubspot
• Pipedrive
• SugarCRM
• ZohoCRM

And marketing automation tools such as:

• Pardot
• Marketo
• Hubspot
• Customer.io
• Constant Contact

Of course, Umbraco isn’t limited to this list. It can integrate with any CRM or marketing automation tool, legacy systems, custom internal databases, APIs, and more.

Why We Recommend Umbraco

As your business grows, Umbraco is ready to grow with you. Umbraco is a scalable CMS that has the ability to adapt to any business requirements. It is easy to use, license-free, built on Microsoft’s .NET framework, and has a slew of features any editor would get excited about. Umbraco will help you build a conversion-focused website that engages your visitors without the hassle of a clunky, limited editing experience.

Need help from web development pros? Marcel Digital is one of 12 Umbraco Gold Partners in the US. We know the ins and outs of Umbraco web design, and are a leading Umbraco agency, focused on building custom solutions and long-term partnerships. Reach out to us, we'd love to hear from you.