Level One Umbraco Certified!

Oh yeah baby!

It was quite a trip to Seattle the last couple days, with Gary and Rob, to get our level one Umbraco certification and become one of the few Umbraco solution providers in North America. I've gone through the crash-course with Jason already, and created about seven websites with it, and gathered a working knowledge of Umbraco that's quite enough to get any Designer in trouble. But now, after having gone through the course headed by Paul Sterling, an Umbraco Evangelist for North America, I know how to do things right and without having to ask for (as much) help.

We started off getting familiar with Document Types, which are the building blocks of an Umbraco site. Then we moved into Templates, which organize the presentation of data and content. We followed the booklet that took us through CSS, XSLT, Macros, Packages, and other Umbraco functions that went beyond the basics.

Yeah, I knew most of it at the beginning and was enjoying the review on how to create Document Types and make Master / Sub-Master Templates and hook up the CSS. But then we got into stuff I'd never done before like create a multilingual site, use Dictionary Items to translate bits of text, create a FAQ with a Contour form for submitting questions, and add a Search Engine to name a few.

I think that installing and working with Packages such as Contour Forms and Runway Search was the most valuable part of the course for me. Those were tasks that I'd known about but never really done before, so I'm glad to have a better handle on those now. Umbraco makes it really easy to manage some of these third-party applications.

This course has been really valuable for me and ProWorks, as my understanding of Umbraco now allows me a greater range in putting websites together. As a team we can do just about any web project imaginable I'm sure!

Has anyone made level two certification? Should I go for that? Should any designer be allowed to go that far??