Written by Heather Floyd     For umbraco versions: All

Reference
What umbraco is, what you need, how to get started.

Contents

 

Skills Requirements

In order to get a basic umbraco site up with the least frustration you should feel comfortable with the following before you begin:

  • Designing a simple website using HTML and/or a WYSIWYG program (Dreamweaver, for instance)
  • Hand-editing HTML code (in other words, if you look at it you can understand it!)
  • Some basics of FTPing files to a web server and creating a database on your web server (sometimes your hosting company's tech support can help you)


In order to get the most out of umbraco and the most professional results, you will need to have or get:

  • Some graphic web design skills
  • A good understanding of website navigation structure/ information architecture
  • A basic concept of 'database' design (aka having "things" with "properties" (ex: An "Event" would have a date, a start time, a location, a description, etc)
  • A rudimentary understanding of XML & XSLT (You can accomplish and learn a lot by looking at example code, but this is the main learning curve for those new to umbraco)


For advanced functionality and customization:

  • You can do ANYTHING with your umbraco site, including linking it to other systems/databases, creating complex custom business rules, setting up e-commerce, etc, but you will need to have a good enough understanding of ASP.Net and related technologies to create custom controls or alter the source code.

If you are lacking some essential skills to get you started, or need a very professional site up and running quickly, you should seriously consider hiring someone with experience creating umbraco sites to set yours up. After the initial site is up, you will be able to add and edit the content, and if you want to, learn how to expand your site with additional content types (called doctypes), create more XSLTs to pull, sort and filter your content, and edit the HTML code of the design. Once your site is up, you still have complete control of all its aspects and future development (an advantage of an umbraco site rather than having a web developer create a proprietary CMS system for you).