Book a senior Umbraco specialist for a single week at a flat £500 a day. No recruiters, no three month contracts, no ramp-up burned on learning the CMS.
Sometimes you do not need a project, a partner or a journey. You need a competent pair of hands for one week: to clear the backlog that has been embarrassing the team since spring, to cover the developer who just handed in notice, to build the one feature marketing has been promised three times, or to get an expert eye over a site before something big rides on it.
The old ways of getting a week of help are all slower than the week itself. Recruiters want a three month contract and a margin. Agencies want a discovery phase. Job boards want you to interview five strangers and guess which one has actually used Umbraco rather than skimmed its documentation. By the time any of that concludes, the week you needed has become a quarter.
Hiring a specialist directly collapses all of it: one conversation, one digital contract, and a developer who has shipped over 200 Umbraco sites starting on Monday.
One message describing the week's goal, your Umbraco version and how I get access. I reply within one working day, usually the same day, with an honest view of what fits in five days.
A digital contract signed in minutes, confidentiality included as standard. We agree the week and the definition of done before it starts.
No ramp-up theatre. I am productive in an unfamiliar Umbraco codebase within hours, and you see progress daily rather than discovering it at the end.
Work committed, documented and explained to your team. If you want more weeks or a retainer afterwards, fine; if not, the engagement ends as cleanly as it started.
Five days of a senior specialist goes further than most teams expect, because the expensive part of development is usually not typing, it is figuring out. A well-scoped week comfortably covers a feature build, a performance investigation with fixes, a security review with remediation, an integration with a third-party service, or unblocking an upgrade your team will then finish themselves. The scoping conversation before the week is where the value gets locked in, and it is free.
What a week does not suit is vagueness. "Come and improve things" burns day one on archaeology. That is why step one is agreeing the mission in writing: the clearer the target, the more of the £2,500 goes on hitting it.
A recruiter placing a contractor takes a margin for making an introduction and guarantees nothing about Umbraco depth. An agency wraps the developer you want in account management you do not want. Direct engagement means the person you brief is the person who codes, the flat £500 a day on the pricing page is the whole cost, and questions get answered by the one person who actually knows.
The Umbraco depth is the other half. Fourteen years and every version from 4 to 17 means your week is not subsidising anyone's learning curve. The full range of what I take on in short engagements is described under Umbraco development.
Agencies book weeks the same way, delivered white label under their own brand; that arrangement is roughly forty percent of my practice. A week of quiet senior cover has saved more than one agency deadline nobody outside the building ever knew was at risk.
Diaries being what they are, named weeks go to whoever asks first. Send the mission through the contact page, and if a single week later turns out to be the start of something regular, retainers make ongoing cover cheaper than repeated one-off bookings.
Tell me what you're working on and I'll come back within one working day.
A specialist Umbraco developer offering freelance / contract services to a wide variety of clients across the UK
Maesgwyn, 3 Claremont rd,
Llandudno, North Wales, LL30 2UF