956 Reasons Why Umbraco Rocks for Designers

Hold up, first of all, what is Umbraco? It's a Content Management System (CMS) for building and managing websites. We use it to make websites and our clients use it to edit and update thier web content.

Umbraco has been rockin' my socks since I first installed it and started learning it. Maybe I was so impressed because I was coming from CMSs like Wordpress, SiteFinity, SiteCore, AspDotNetStorefront, and Magento, which are good at certain things but not so easy for Designers to work with. The following are 956 reasons why Umbraco has made life nice for me as a Designer.

Reasons 1-342

The 342 hairs on your head you don't have to pull out because nothing messed with your markup. So many times with Wordpress I've created markup that ends up getting munged up because of some process, widget, or plugin that I have no control over. With Umbraco I have FULL control over the markup I write and it's presented with no surprises.

Reasons 343-361

The 18 hours you don't have to spend looking for the correct file to edit. Umbraco makes all the CSS, HTML, Media, scripts and XSLT files easy to create, find, and edit. They're all right there! No more digging around some crazy folder stucture (*cough* Magento) to find what you need. No more finding a file to realize you can't even edit it (*cough* SiteFinity). You can organize things your way so down the road if there's a bug, you don't need a diagram to figure out where it is.

Reasons 362-397

The 35 phone calls you won't get from your client asking you to edit the content. With Umbraco you can set up Rich Text Editors that your clients can use to edit the content themselves. You can also set up default styling for text, headings, lists, tables and such so you can make sure everything looks great and the client won't need to worry about it. Yeah I know, that's the definition of a CMS, but Umbraco finds the right balance between ease of use and control that other CMS's lack.

Reasons 398-955

The 557 (and growing) packages, add-ons, and extensions to help you customize your web experience. Need a way to manage crops on images? No problem! There's a few packages that'll handle that. Need a blog? There's a package for that too. E-Commerce Solutions, Form Builders...without sounding like an Apple commercial, there's pretty much a package for everything. They're super easy to install too, you can do it right from the admin panel.

Reason 956

It's Free!

And that's just the list for us "lightweight" front end guys that don't need to worry about the back end code too much. Imagine how long the list is for the developers!

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