Cogwork's journey to becoming an Umbraco Platinum Partner

Cogworks have been Umbraco experts and friends of the community since 2008? Our team has a rich history of collaboration, contributions, and achievements within the Umbraco community, which we continue to add to. In 2024, we were announced as Umbraco Platinum Partners, and we couldn't be more proud. 

Here's a quick story of our partner journey:

In 2006, Cogworks was born in a basement in Central London. 

We developed our own content management system, 'The CogCMS,' with dreams of becoming the next proprietary CMS pioneers (think Adobe, Sitecore, that sort of thing.)

That same year, Cogworks' CEO, Adam, found Umbraco and quickly became inspired by the talented open-source community and innovative, flexible, free-to-use technology. 

The values typically found in an open-source environment like Umbraco—community, collaboration, and honesty—resonated closely with CEO Adam's values. In fact, these principles have been the guiding influence on how Cogworks has operated since 2006.

In 2008, we became the first dedicated UK Umbraco Partner. Feeling welcomed and inspired by the experts around us, we pledged to do our bit for the Umbraco project, starting with a proper community meetup.

Back then, there were no meetups or events in the UK. The first Umbraco London Meetup was held at the LBI offices in Brick Lane on 6 August 2009; we had around 20 people show up, and it grew from there.

Fast-forward to today and the London Umbraco meetup is a 662-member community that actively contributes to the pioneering and award-winning open-source CMS Umbraco.

In 2010, we became one of the world's first Umbraco Gold Partners, an official recognition of our commitment to contributing to the Umbraco community and delivering innovative solutions with every version of Umbraco to date! 

• 2010 - The year we hosted Umbraco’s 5th birthday bash; bringing folks together in person and making connections to last a lifetime.

• In 2016 we trained Umbraco Level 2 courses in the UK and Poland, improving customer project quality and teaching new Umbraco developers. 

• In 2019, we threw an enormous party, otherwise known as the Umbraco UK Festival. Together with our team, we hosted the largest-ever community Umbraco event, showcasing talent and innovation in the Umbraco world.

• In 2021, Head of Development Imran got Umbraco Certified Master status for his exceptional skills. That year, we became a Contributing Gold Partner for helping grow Umbraco through technical, educational and event-based contributions that have helped get the Umbraco CMS to where it is today.

• A smooth migration for Smith and Willamson from Sitecore, transferring 4500 pages across two websites.

• Evelyn Partners designed and rebuilt their site on Umbraco, showcasing UX and UI techniques that boast logical Information Architecture to drive leads.

• For Foster + Partners, we integrated Umbraco with Azure to create an intelligent live search system and intranet that serves its global workforce in real-time.

• Fed by Abel & Cole received a sustainable Umbraco eCommerce platform with custom APIs for personalised office deliveries.

• Canada Life benefits from a dynamic Umbraco website with intelligent integrations, future-proofing their legacy systems.

• Following a Cogworks Umbraco Health Check, Day's Out Guide experienced 1000% faster page-load times and user traffic capacity.
  
  
• Many more ✨

Our platinum partner status was officially announced in January 2024, making this the pinnacle of our Umbraco journey so far. 

As Umbraco Platinum Partners, we remain dedicated to pushing the boundaries of innovation and providing seamless, personalised experiences for our clients on .NET and modern front-end frameworks.

Our years of expertise and the flexibility of Umbraco help us empower brands with solutions using composable enterprise architecture, allowing rapid innovation, streamlined business workflows and incredible user experiences that deliver on ROI. 

Above all, we believe in Umbraco, and in recent years, the world has been discovering the power of Umbraco, too. Recently, Umbraco has received countless awards from leading software review platform, G2, including: 

• Top 50 EMEA Software Companies 

• Top 50 Content Management Products at the Best Software Awards (which is basically like the Grammy's for the tech industry) 🏆