Umbraco User's Guide

FLEXIBLE CONTENT STRUCTURE

Because Umbraco is built on such a loosely coupled design, you, as the administrator and developer, are provided with an endless combination of variations for structuring your site. As a result, thinking about what your sitemap should look like before you dig in is extra important. As a general rule, try to design the first two to three levels of your site before you start building out your document types.

It's recommended that you use a sitemap, mindmap diagram, or similar tool when you're in the analysis phase of your project. Doing so enables you to relatively quickly create a hierarchical structure and start to visualize what your site will ultimately look like. A quick Google search can yield all sorts of options for you.

Although the flexibility of Umbraco is great, knowing what level of control you should provide to the site's editors is important. The following sections describe how you can limit and control this structure intimately, providing a user-friendly experience for the end user and a proper setup for search engine optimization (SEO) purposes.

Creating a Document Type

To start, go over the interface used to maintain your document types. Navigate to the Settings section and click the Document Types node in the left pane. If you followed the installation steps outlined in Chapter 1, you should see several document types listed already, ...