We're big fans of Umbraco, for many of the reasons that it's beloved by developers worldwide. But even we'll be the first to admit that, out of the box, it's not exactly easy to set up -nor does it provide a low-tech way of creating layouts, organising content, or even publishing blog posts.

While many content systems do boast extreme ease-of-use, that's never really been one of Umbraco's strengths. Plus, a lot of these platforms sacrifice flexibility, scalability, performance or stability in order to make them easier to quickly build pages and launch websites.

That's where uSkinned comes in

uSkinned creates a drag-and-drop website building layer on top of Umbraco. It was developed by a Scottish and South African agency in the days of Umbraco 6 and 7, as an answer to their clients' desire for an easier to use interface that their internal marketing teams could use without needing to make development tickets.

It offers Umbraco site owners a similar level of visual layout and template building that you might find in WIX or WordPress with Elementor, while keeping you on a powerful and modern tech stack that your developers will love.

What we like about it

• A great visual editor that offers lots of advanced tools for fine-tuning layouts
• Awesome customer support from the uSkinned team
• A much better blog post editor your Marketers will love
• The ability to set properties for individual components and variations that can be re-used
• Automatic generation of sitemaps, robots.txt, etc.

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What we think it still needs

• Some tools that make content migration easier - uSkinned is often implemented to help clients manage existing websites more easily, but it lacks some basic importing tools
• The theme library only has a few really good themes, with the rest looking a little dated or generic. (This is less of a problem these days as uSkinned makes it really easy to create a nice layout and design over a basic theme)

How much does it cost?

uSkinned offers a 7-day trial, which is usually enough to put together a basic site if you've already got Umbraco installed

After that, you have a self-hosted option and a hosted option. If you don't have an Umbraco instance ready to go, we'd highly recommend going with the Hosted option as this will get you going right away:

Hosted: £30/month

Self-Hosted: £21.59/month (£259 paid annually)

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Sound good? Let us put a uSkinned site together for you, so that your Marketing team can finally have the "drag-and-drop" builder they've been asking for - without compromising on performance or stability.

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