Company name: Webwonders
Job Role: Co-owner and Umbraco specialist
Country: The Netherlands
For how long have you been working with Umbraco?: Since Version 7 so about 6,5 years.
What’s your favorite Umbraco moment?
The way that Umbraco was the driving force that took me from a carpenter almost 8 years ago to a business owner in 2020.
Umbraco is easy to get started with, but as you evolve the challenges grow and so does your knowledge.
When I look back at the last 6,5 years, I realise that most of the knowledge I have right now comes from working with Umbraco, speaking with the awesome community members, doing courses and especially from my first Codegarden in 2017.
Umbraco kept me curious and hungry for more.
Meeting Niels at HQ with my son
What in your Umbraco career are you most proud of?
Using Umbraco to change our company to a more streamlined development company. Some of our biggest clients were restricted by an old custom CMS (or even no CMS at all) and we now gave them the freedom they want and need.
When I started managing the technical aspect of our company, we deployed with remote desktop and now we are almost an exclusive Umbraco Cloud company.
If I have to pick one project, it’s definitely the project where we moved one of the largest fireworks shops in the Netherlands to Umbraco. It now uses multiple load-balanced Umbraco instances that are integrated with two custom backends.
I couldn’t have dreamed of this happening when I started with Umbraco.
What about Umbraco keeps you coming back for more?
The hands-on approach of Umbraco and its community. At the moment I’m involved in Modelsbuilder and the Dutch Umbraco User Group. It's this involvement that makes you come up with new ideas and lets you meet new people.
If you run into issues with the CMS or community packages, you can help out and make things better and more user friendly. Therefore you have a great influence on the project and the direction Umbraco is going.
I also love to help others out if they have any questions and to give information to people who are starting the journey where I started 8 years ago.
Getting interviewed by Umbraco
What are you currently working on?
Currently, we are building a few corporate websites and we’re starting a very challenging project where we are raising our Umbraco knowledge to a whole new level. More on that later 😉
What are your top 3 best tips for an Umbraco newbie?
Get involved and don’t be afraid of asking the community for help. We are here for you and definitely go to Codegarden!!
Any aspirations for your future?
I would love to get nominated for the Umbraco Awards and maybe even win one?
If you could have a superpower - what would it be?
To stop time. I have so much to do and so little time.
Tell us something unexpected about yourself!
I play in a band that plays German/Austrian folk music and we just released our first CD.
The CD cover of the first CD of “Die Lustigen Brüder”
What on top of your bucket list?
To ride around Mount Everest on a motorcycle together with my wife.
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It's amazing to see what's possible if you are patient and work hard. Vielen Dank for sharing your story, Frans! If you’d like to connect with him, you can find him on LinkedIn or Twitter
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