Managing a corporate website, extranet or intranet presents significant challenges. As a common business tool your website must offer your customers, partners and employees relevant and high-quality content.

Umbraco is a content management system (CMS) that gives you the flexibility, responsiveness and control over your content. It makes it easy for non-technical staff to update and maintain information without requiring expensive technical support resources.

As Umbraco is web-based there is no software to install. The system is accessed via a web-browser, so that your staff can update your site wherever there is Internet access and a PC.

Umbraco gives your staff the appropriate control over information, whilst delivering real cost savings by reducing long-term maintenance costs.

You can check out three Umbraco-based web sites below (all links open a new window):

• Health and Safety Laboratory
• Central Manchester University Hospitals Genetic Medicine
• NHS South West Essex Community Services

[Dick Turpin points his pistol at Madame Desiree]

Madame Desiree: That doesn't scare me. I've seen bigger ones in my time.
Dick Turpin: That doesn't surprise me.

(Carry on Dick, 1974)

One of the things I’m asked about is from people who have a web site for their business but they can’t tell if they're getting any benefit from it.  Sometimes a customer will say they found their web site or they’ll be contacted through their web site, but if you’re not directly trading online how do you measure how well your web site is performing?

Take the club I mentioned in Carry on up the Internet: You haven’t got Mail.  They had their web site but they didn’t know anything about how well it was working.  They didn’t know how many people visited their web site, which pages they looked at, or anything else about how well their site was doing.  Their web hosting didn’t include any usage statistics or access to log files.  If they’d had access to their web server’s log files they could have used software like AWstats to see how they were doing.

I suggested they could add Google Analytics to find out what was happening on their site.  Google Analytics is a great, free tool that we’ve used successfully with a lot of our clients.  Now for some, a tool which describes itself as “…the enterprise-class web analytics solution that gives you rich insights into your website traffic and marketing effectiveness.” may sound a little bit of overkill.  When I told them it had over 80 different reports I could see the look of fear forming behind their eyes. 

I had a feeling I was about to metamorphose into Michael Winner in an advert for car insurance.  So I took a step back and showed them the Google Analytics dashboard.

One of the great things about Google Analytics is that you can decide how far to dig into it.  If you’re just starting out you can see the most important information for your site on the dashboard.  Straight away you can see how many visitors you’ve had, how many pages they viewed, how much time they spent on the site, where they came from and the top five pages they looked at.  Once you’ve dipped your toe in the water, you can dig deeper into Google Analytics and figure out what else is useful for you.

Adding it to a site is easy if you’re using a templated content management system but if, like the club you are writing each page by hand, copying and pasting the code into a small web site isn’t too difficult either.