Bridging the Gap: Designers, Developers, and the Next Shift in CMS
Marketing teams often struggle to move at the pace they need, waiting on development resources for every small change. Join Peter as he unpacks how pairing Umbraco with a visual CMS such as Plasmic removes those roadblocks and helps campaigns go live faster.
I’ve been part of the Umbraco community for a long time - think Yahoo Groups long. Nearly two decades ago I was in New Zealand, asking basic questions about Umbraco 2.1 and getting hooked by the generosity of the community. My first Codegarden felt organic: talk schedules sketched on a wall, the big open circle (this was still possible back then), and it was almost possible to know almost everyone in the community. So many great friendships were birthed through my involvement in the Umbraco community and the Codegarden events.
Today I lead a team on the Gold Coast at Koben Digital in the role of CTO, working alongside my wife and business partner (our CEO). We’re a full-service agency that loves doing meaningful work with Umbraco - often in the for-good space with charities and government - and with anyone ready to jump on the Umbraco bandwagon to do interesting things.
But the point is this post is not a history lesson, but an opportunity to unpack a frustration that both myself and possibly clients have with regards to moving fast and getting things done when it comes to marketing campaigns. These sometimes require quick action to take advantage of a shift in the market, an emerging opportunity, or reacting to a global event, like many of Koben’s clients in the NFP space must with rapid and unpredictable changes in the geo-political mess that our planet is currently in.
So let me unpack this frustration.
The problem with CMS delivery cycles (Umbraco, Sitecore, WordPress)
Whether you call it agile or waterfall, the rhythm is generally the same: planning → design → development → release → support. Designers create beautiful concepts & prototypes in Figma; clients sign off; then everything tends to slow. A typical story might be when a marketing team makes a request of the dev team or dev partner providing them with the design and asks, “How long?” The default answer might be: “Two weeks.”
It could be a simple CTA or a full landing page, the time is not really relevant other than it pauses things, the momentum is now gone - the dev cycle still bites: understand design, code, test, release. The process is the process and it exists for a reason to ensure quality, that the release is regression proof. Sometimes this isn’t even why there is a delay, it can be down to when the CAB (change advisory board) or similar has reviewed and approved the change for a future deployment.
What happens next can be a little unpredictable: Some will accept this process, and wait, or maybe even delay their activity to allow for the dev cycle to complete. But in some cases, where there may not be so much governance, some teams will reach for whatever they can run themselves - Wix, Webflow, Squarespace, Short Hand or any of the multitude of visual site / campaign builders on the market. It gets the job done, but at a cost: poor governance, brand drift, shaky workflows, scalability issues, fragmentation, off-brand domains, and limited extensibility back into the well-engineered Umbraco solution you already have. This sounds a little far fetched, but I have personally seen this occur.
Umbraco block list, Block Grid, and uSkinned: strengths and limits
As we deliver a lot of our projects using Umbraco, I will focus specifically on the options available in that eco-system, but generally this story could be applied to any CMS such as Sitecore, Kentico, Drupal, or even WordPress with a custom branded theme, as they all generally do the same thing.
For Umbraco, the core Block List and Block Grid are excellent for editors and go some way to providing flexibility by allowing them to select components (blocks) from a library and select the order in the layout that they appear, but the downside… you still need to have designed and developed the full component library and options ahead of time. The moment a new requirement appears (e.g., a campaign nuance, a custom component, a special way of presenting that can’t be achieved within the current set of features), you’re back in the dev cycle.
What about uSkinned?. We have used uSkinned on a number of projects at Koben, and yes, it can speed things up too, but it’s opinionated in its approach. You still live within the boundaries of components it provides, and the same trade-offs remain.
But what if there was a way to get around these limitations, to blur the boundaries between marketing, creative and development?
Let’s build a different bridge. What is a Visual CMS?
There’s an emerging pattern I’m excited about. The Visual CMS. Think of it as a system focused on the visual delivery layer - components, templates, and variants - designed so designers/marketers can work in familiar tools while developers keep the foundations strong. Developers can still maintain core components and functionality, but open portals that allow for the inclusion of bespoke campaign assets or even full pages without requiring a full development cycle to deliver.
One example is Plasmic. It plays nicely with headless setups and popular front-end frameworks like Next.js. Because Umbraco can run headless via the Content Delivery API or HeartCore, you can combine the flexibility of Umbraco with Next.js and Plasmic to deliver a robust and creatively flexible marketing platform.
Designers do not need to abandon their toolset either, Plasmic can ingest Figma designs via copy-paste, although I have found it to be a little fiddly and has specific recommendations for how to format your Figma file, it is still effective in speeding up the workflow. Plasmic allows no/low-coders to manage responsive variants, update components and connect to data through a visual design interface that feels familiar.
The result: designers and marketers move quickly; developers stay in control of the architecture, API contracts, and component boundaries.
Do Visual CMS tools replace Front-End Developers?
No. Implementing a Visual CMS doesn’t remove the need for front-end engineering; it changes the focus. Complex, dynamic features still require proper code. Plasmic even lets you bring your own web components into its environment, so you can compose real, engineered parts with visually managed ones.
Developers spend more time on what matters - robust systems, performance, and extensibility - instead of repeatedly building one-off banners and landing pages.
The future of CMS: Visual CMS trends for 2025 and beyond
Analysts (e.g., Forrester) are already pointing to this direction of travel: fewer dev cycles for routine marketing changes, tighter collaboration between design and development, and faster routes to publishing. Tools in this “Visual CMS” category differ - some are CMS-agnostic (like Plasmic), while others pull you into their own CMS. This space will keep evolving.
For teams with fast-moving campaigns and strong brand requirements - charities, government, and anyone who needs speed with governance - in my opinion this approach could bridge the divide.
Umbraco can remain your CMS backbone. Next.js or similar framework delivers the frontend and a Visual CMS such as Plasmic handles the aspects of presentation where you require flexibility.
Want to know what this could mean for your organisation?
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