What's driving us?
Our website was in need of a bit of botox, a new
design to keep us looking and feeling fresh. The decision to get an
online facelift gave us the opportunity to upgrade the CMS driving
our site and try something different.
We've got a strong web focus at Simbient. We've built massive web
portals solutions for the finance and insurance industries. We've
put together rich websites bubbling with social networking widgets
for media clients. We've implemented shopping carts and
online inventory management. Now it was time to refresh our own
website we had a technical decision to make. Which CMS weapon
should we wield?
We wanted a CMS that was extensible, but lightweight. We wanted to
be able to plug in a new design simply as we iteratively improved
our design - or if we suddenly changed
our direction 180 degrees and decided on a completely new look. It
had to be easy to use for our content authors, but still give our
developers the tools to add the bells and whistles as we dreamed
them up.
Some of our Sharepoint gurus pushed for a Sharepoint 2010
solution. We considered using the Simbient CMS system, the latest
version powers through some heavy duty user-content driven media
sites. But if using Sharepoint 2010 felt like peeling an orange
with a screwdriver, using the Simbient CMS felt like doing it with
a bayonet.
In the end we've gone with
Umbraco. It's an open source CMS
written in Microsoft ASP.NET. It's light weight and user friendly.
The documentation is a bit sparse, however an active developer
community makes up for the lack of official guides.
Umbraco is easily extended through XSLT and .NET user controls,
meaning that we can quickly develop and deploy any widget we dream
up. So far, it's looking like another useful weapon in our
armoury.
So that's what is driving Simbient's online presence. What's
driving your business online?
Contact us to
discuss it.