Creating a Basic Website

A guide to creating a Basic Website using Umbraco

This tutorial was last tested on the latest version of Umbraco 11.

Introduction

This tutorial will take you step-by-step through an Umbraco website build. It will allow you to take any website "template" (for example, flat HTML, CSS, and JavaScript) and install it into a fresh Umbraco site. You can then wire up the sections that need content managing by Umbraco.

We will avoid using any starter kits in this tutorial. Although these are useful, they won’t provide you with an understanding of the basics of Umbraco. We'll look at how to create Document Types and Templates and how these work together to build pages.

It is recommended that you work through the subsections in the following order.

Getting Started

To follow this tutorial, work through this section first.

Creating Your First Document Type

How to create Document Types and what they do.

Creating Your First Template and Content Node

How to create your first template and create a content node.

CSS & Images

Adding the CSS and JavaScript for your site into Umbraco.

Displaying the Document Type Properties

How to wire the Document Type Properties (Umbraco Data Fields) into the templates to output the editor's data in the right place.

Creating a Master Template

How to create a Master Template and use this to create more pages whilst minimizing duplicate HTML code from your flat source files.

Creating Pages and using the Master Template

using the Master template to create new page types.

Setting The Navigation Menu

A solution for the template in the menu.

Articles Parent and Article Items

How to have a parent page that lists and links to child nodes automatically. For example, an article list page containing a flexible/infinite number of articles - useful for Blogs or News pages.

Adding Language Variants

At this point we have a basic site, but wouldn't it be cool if we could make the same site in another language? Read on to see how to get started with Language Variants!

Conclusions

By this point you'll have a basic working site - but where to next? You've barely scratched the surface of the power of Umbraco - a few links to send you on your way!