Clickability (discontinued) vs. Squarespace vs. Umbraco CMS

As a true content management system it is great for site and content creation. It does need some help when it comes to adding functionality for using modern code systems that require server side scripting. For a marketing or public company site, it is an ideal CMS. For a SAAS type site, there could be many road blocks.

Squarespace is one of the best solutions out there for building a website or web experience that looks good, has great functionality and is cost-effective, even for smaller businesses. Although most people in marketing will find most of the elements intuitive, if the creator is struggling with any of the functionality, there are many, many support options and other users who can offer assistance.

Incentivized

Umbraco CMS is the perfect tool for a company that is looking to keep their website updated. The simple to use tools and templates means updating and creating new pages is easy. The WYSIWYG editor is a nice feature, however, for accessibility, there should be some more guidance on what is suitable to be used on the CMS.

Incentivized

• Easy to get going for a business that has tons of content they need to manage.
• Clickability offers development and design services so you don't really even need IT.
• No need to worry about server uptime, storage, bandwidth, etc you have all the reports at your fingers for what you are using.
• Simple template and content design system, easy to expand and add.
• Powerful CMS and settings with a design and programming guide provided.
• AkAMAI and Limelight CDN's can be used for powerful and fast loading in many regions.
• Debugging tools to see how long specific templates and content load is exceptional. One can narrow down that this specific template ran X number of times and took this look and had to be stopped at X number of time due to exceeding set limits.
• Having a built in Dev, Staging, Production environments for testing makes seeing new features and how they will integrate into your site seamless.

• Stupid simple to use. I know very creative people who cannot code and this is probably the easiest ever platform for them!
• Pretty website templates and great functionality with showing off portfolios.
• They've already figured out what are the problems that non-coding people have when creating websites and they've figured out a simple solution for all of it.

Incentivized

• Quick to learn. For most if cases, developer needs to know Razor coding.
• Doesn't require back-end programming.
• Has build in users management (developers, content managers) and members management consoles (users of the site).
• Clear admin tool (especially in version 7)
• Fast.
• Creating code from scratch, so it is easier to create clean code.

• Choosing ad size/placement should be easier than it is. Now, I have to re-create the whole thing.
• When you "save" anything a pop-up comes up that is redundant.
• Ad list only shows a limited number. It's not until you click on one and cancel it out, then you can see all the listings. A bit tedious and redundant.

Incentivized

• Customizing the sites can be highly UN intuitive
• Navigation for editing the sites can be difficult and frustrating
• Squarespace has different versions and it's hard to know which version you're on. You can't switch after you start making a site with one version.

Incentivized

• Speed for older sites - Umbraco content can load slowly if you have thousands of pages of content. Of course, this would not be a problem for simpler websites
• Complexity - since the product is free out-of-the-box, it will take technical expertise to get Umbraco setup properly

Incentivized

As mentioned in the last questions we are going to use a competitor brand next year. I think the issues are trying to find and fix problems from the previous programer. The steep learning curve and lack of mobile and social sharing capabilities. Things that I like are the strength of the programing which comes with a trade off. The ease for those who don't know markup to make updates to the website. Clickability isn't the easiest and can be difficult to find the content that you are interested in. We will not be using it next year.

Unless our website requires significantly more functionality in the future, I can't see us terminating our contract

Incentivized

My experience with Clickability has been mostly positive but there are a few areas for improvement. It's generally easy to learn and use on a daily basis. I can move fast and do my job with speed with needed. But there is some clunky functionality with targeting and page building. My rating would be higher if some improvements were made.

It's simple to use for someone who is really good with computers as well as those who are not. I've been using my personal squarespace for years and have also helped clients build a starting page which they are later able to manage theirselves.

Incentivized

Umbraco CMS effectively addresses enterprise content management needs. It's quite mature .NET based CMS, standing out as a leader among its competitors. Websites built with Umbraco are blazing fast. Extensive customization capabilities, and user-friendly content publishing interface makes it an ideal choice for businesses looking for a mature CMS solution.

Incentivized

Occasionally, errors will appear in the admin that make it impossible to work without developer support.

Incentivized

Working in the admin panel (adding / reviewing / editing content) is very slow. The public facing site speed is dependent on what the pages are doing and how well the code was written (whether it is optimized for speed).

Incentivized

I found that some agents were better then others, usually you have an account representative and that I would consider level 1 support. To get really complex answers you need to talk with an engineer.

Help is available directly from the back end and uses full sentence searching to find answers to questions others may have asked before. With a ton of articles and support questions documents, it is very likely that your question has been answered. If not each page has the ability to open a direct email to support. Each case has a number and can be followed. Responses are often quick and have links and directions clearly stated

Incentivized

Support for Umbraco-owned paid plugins is nonexistent.

Incentivized

Online training is often based on older versions of the platform. So, you'll have to fill in the gaps on your own.

Incentivized

Overall, it was pretty seemless to switch the sites over.

Spend the time to wireframe the content structure prior to diving in. This helps speed the process of implementation and it serves as documentation for end users.

Incentivized

Many of other content management systems similar to WordPress need custom installation. The server costs and upgrades quickly add up. Clickability while expensive, eliminated the overhead of managing all the dependency needs for a CMS. Clickability also works with its clients to understand the business needs and proposes the solutions accordingly. They have a good support team.

Incentivized

Squarespace was quicker to set up and more accessible to manipulate the theme, pictures, and content. The page layouts are more versatile and fluid. With WordPress, more time-consuming efforts go into making a template work the way you want it to (because of the lack of the drag-and-drop grids that Squarespace has).

Incentivized

Umbraco's templating is far superior than WordPress, Drupal and Joomla, but it's update process is WAY behind those platforms. The release schedule of Umbraco is way to often and most releases are to fix something missed in the previous release and not an improvement or new feature of the CMS

Without significant development, the product does not scale well.

Incentivized

• I know a big positive is the fact that it is always-on. We are the leading news corporation for our state, and in many markets, nationwide. We pride ourselves on our strong ethics in the community and thus need to exude reliability to maintain the trust of these communities. Having a website fail periodically erodes that reliable perception.
• It has allowed different areas of the company to approach our team and work in a cohesive manner.

• The cost is reasonably decent. My client says they spent about $20 a month or $240 a year. I asked her if she could add Google AdSense to her blog one day, and they believe they can. They said a custom site would cost them $3000-10,000 depending on who does it. And I agreed, but I found the website they created was on the lower end of that range.

Incentivized

• Has helped us to create more engaging pages that push people to complete the online forms
• We have seen more people buy from us since we launched our new look website
• We can easily update the content without waiting for the development team to make changes

Incentivized