Web developer of 25 years and digital team lead, Nick Wright, had been looking for a more cost-effective solution that could meet the demands of city council and local community web projects whilst increasing development productivity.
The Problem
Having worked with expensive and restrictive CMS platforms in the past, Salford City Council's team of .NET developers and web designers were on the lookout for a more cost-effective solution to meet the needs of the many web projects required for a modern City.
We typically bought large corporate CMS solution’s that were complex to setup and difficult to alter. We needed to find a faster, more efficient way of working. uSkinned themes coupled with Umbraco CMS have been the perfect fit!
The Solution
Ease of management and an intuitive, consistent back office content editor experience across all projects would be the key to the teams success. The ability to quickly prototype pages and refresh designs in an agile fashion would allow developers to focus their skills more effectively. Additionally, a cost-effective solution that would not only benefit the digital team but the wider team within the council as well as the users of the websites.
The quality of the themes are very high and packed with all the features our users expect. They've allowed us to focus on solutions that are 'out of the box' rather than bespoke development.
The Outcome
Since adopting uSkinned themes as a baseline solution for their web projects Salford City Council's web team have seen an increase in productivity and a reduction in development costs. This has, ultimately, benefited end-users and service leads within the council alike.
We'll now hand things over to Nick Wright, as he walks us through how uSkinned Site Builder delivers for Salford City Council.
Typically these might have been projects that we'd have turned down and instead enlisted the help of an external agency due to the demands of our existing workload. However, uSkinned Site Builder has helped us increase our capacity by giving us the head start we needed. Within weeks we had proof of concepts and got positive feedback from members and service leads.
Content authors loved the intuitive CMS setup, this meant there would be fewer queries to our team for custom back-office solutions. We can quickly prototype different designs and iterate a solution in an agile way.
We're not changing much 'out of the box' so support and upgrades are just Umbraco and uSkinned Site Builder changes, rather than bespoke development code.
uSkinned has helped our digital team get passionate and motivated about web design again. Thanks to their starter kits our projects can be launched in a fraction of the time - it's given us a bit of 'sparkle'!
Conclusion
How would you rate the content editor experience in a uSkinned theme?
5 out of 5
What specific features do you love in uSkinned themes and why?
Everything - high quality front end, the highly configurable back end!
What has been the biggest benefit of using a uSkinned theme?
Saved development time
Saved design time
Saved money
Increased profit
Increased development capacity
Learned new skills
What specific features do you love in uSkinned themes?
