In our experience, it’s common for website buyers to treat hosting as a commodity - a bit like electricity and gas supply, website hosting is all the same really, the only difference is the price?  Wrong! There's a big difference in the hosting services on offer, and as a buyer, it’s crucial to understand what you need and what you're getting for your money. Hosting an Umbraco site calls for a number of minimum requirements: you must have Windows-based hosting, it needs to be in Full Trust Mode, and you may (probably) need a SQL server database. That precludes the…

When commissioning a new website built using Umbraco, or any CMS for that matter, its critical to have a clear understanding of your audience.  During the initial scoping of the new website, you should define who you are targeting the website at in as much detail as possible. Having a clear audience definition that clearly states their goals can make it very easy for an agency to understand what you're trying to achieve and ensures that the site is personalised with meaningful content.  The audience statement supports the production of a content specification, and, during the design stages of the…

A website saddled with a bad Content Management System can often really impact the site from being developed to meet your needs. As Umbraco specialists, we’re often approached by potential clients asking for their current site to be migrated to Umbraco. What we’ve learnt is that the impact of failing to properly brief an agency during a migration project can make a huge difference to the quality, timescales, and budgets of what’s being delivered. It can be very difficult for an agency to provide an accurate or effective quote if presented with a brief of “move my site from platform…

Those in the market for an Umbraco website are presented with an often mind-boggling number of options when shopping around for providers: the most common being sole developers and large agencies. Each comes with its own pros and cons, so it’s essential that those looking to source services have the inside track on what to look for and the right questions to ask at the procurement stage. There are plenty of great sole developers out there, in fact, some of the highest profile and most competent Umbraco Developers in the community fall into that category. We think that working with…

Like any piece of modern, evolving software, Umbraco - and its users - benefit from regular release updates.  These could be new patches for specific issues, which come out on a weekly or monthly basis, minor version updates which are released anywhere between a monthly and quarterly basis, or major version releases, which come out every few years. But each release, no matter how major or minor, is always an improvement on what existed before. So when commissioning a new site, it’s crucial to understand what your prospective agency's support policy is regarding applying updates. If your new site is…

As specialist Umbraco developers, we often get called into projects when they hit a crisis. Either something has gone badly wrong, the relationship had gone sour, or there’s no single issue to point the finger at, but a million small cuts. So we’ve got a lot of experience in what can go wrong on a project. And one of the things we see time and time again is websites and webapps built by agencies that don’t follow best practice like using source control systems. Why does this matter? Source control systems like Git and Subversion are databases for the code…

If you’re going to build a website or app you need to face facts: it’s going to have bugs.  Bugs have existed in software since Grace Murray Hopper found her punch card program failed because a moth got trapped in the reader.   Bugs are a fact of software life, because humans are fallible. We make mistakes, we misunderstand specs, we write algorithms incorrectly, or we use the wrong variable.  We believe that instead of trying to write perfect code, we should spend as much time trying to write a good trap.  Testing, therefore, is the saviour of poorly-written code. But…