We're very excited to announce that the next generation of our toolbar interface will be rolling out on the LightCMS platform next week. The completely redesigned interface takes the user experience on LightCMS to a whole new level. We know you are going to love this upgrade. We also know that it is a very prominent visual change and we wanted to give you this information in advance so that you can prepare for and communicate the coming changes to your own clients as well. Please take a look through the exciting details below.

Beautiful, Compact Design That's Always Accessible

Just one look at the new toolbar and we think you'll be sold. It cuts the 155 pixels of screen real estate we currently occupy to an incredibly compact 52 pixels. That's a 66% reduction! Plus, the new toolbar remains fixed to the top of your browser's viewport so no matter how far you scroll down, you'll always have instant access to its controls. The toolbar's sleek new design gives every LightCMS website a polished, professional look in editing mode.

Click the image above to view actual size.

Look closer and you'll see that we've reorganized the toolbar options as well. A simple toggle control on the left edge allows you to switch between website options and store options without refreshing the page. This saves you a page load when moving between store and website controls. Account controls have been moved under the new user session menu (more on that menu below).

The New Page Bar

The previous toolbar had a third tier of controls that were related to page-level editing. Those controls have now been separated out to the all-new Page Bar. The Page Bar hovers over the top right of any page you're editing, but only when your mouse is over the page. The page bar displays the name of the current page's template and contains the fast template switcher, the "add a page" tool, the "preview page" button, and the "page settings" tool.

Left: the Page Bar overlaid in admin mode. Right: fast template switcher appears when its icon is clicked.

The New User Session Menu

On the right edge of the toolbar, you'll see the new User Session Menu. It shows the name and image of the currently logged-in user. The image uses one's gravatar by default (if it exists) but users can upload their own images on their user profiles as well. The User Session Menu shows custom options based on the user who is logged in. All users will see a link to edit their profile in the User Session Menu. This means that non-admin users now have the ability to update their own profile information, a brand new capability with this update.

The User Session Menu with all options active (account-owner view).

Account owners will also find the link to the account section and billing section under the User Session Menu. All billing-related screens (including Account Billing and Client Billing) have been moved under the "Billing" menu item. Clients who manage their own billing will also find their billing screens under the billing item on this menu.

Intelligent Help Link

The "help" item on the toolbar now links to different places based on who is clicking it. If you are logged in as an account owner, the help link will lead you to the account support page inside the admin system. Non-account-owners will be linked to our external user guide (this is where the help item currently links). Resellers can still disable the help link altogether if they choose.

Updating Your Brand

If you are a LightCMS reseller who has private-labeled our platform with your own brand, you may want to make some changes to the logo you display on our toolbar. Please note that even if you make no changes at all, your logo will still remain at the top of all websites under your account even after we switch to the new toolbar. So, technically, no action from you is required. However, we strongly recommend that you consider creating a new logo, optimized specifically for our new toolbar, in order to provide the best possible brand experience to your customers.

Toolbar Customization

With this update, we will be removing the ability to customize the colors of your toolbar. The toolbar will always be presented in the black and gray color scheme you see in the screenshots on this post. As you can imagine, offering the ability to customize the toolbar's colors places limits on what our team can accomplish through the toolbar's functionality. We regret having to remove this level of customization for our resellers, but we feel that all of our users stand to benefit far more by making this new toolbar available. Plus, the ability to customize the toolbar with your own logo still gives you the ability to create a branded experience for your clients.

Logo Replacement

Since the area in which the logo appears now has different dimensions and a dark background, you may want to make adjustments to the logo you use with LightCMS. Here is some information to help you prepare a new logo that will work well with the new LightCMS toolbar.

• Your logo should be no more than 130 pixels wide and 30 pixels tall. If your logo exceeds either of these dimensions, our system will resize your logo to fit.
• Your logo should be a transparent .png file. Files of type .gif will still be supported but probably won't look quite as clean.
• Your logo should be formatted to work on a dark background. There are several different ways to approach this. Here's a quick example using the logo of one of our LightCMS Featured Partners, Collision Media.

Collision's logo as implemented on current LightCMS toolbar

Collision's logo implemented on new LightCMS toolbar with reversed colors

Another approach, using only the mark from Collision's brand set in black for a subtle look

To help you prepare a new logo in advance of the toolbar's release, our design team has prepared a small design template which provides you a sample of the toolbar's background and shows you the area you have to work with. You can download this template for Photoshop (.psd) or for Fireworks (.png). Once you have your new logo ready, you'll simply need to upload it on your Account Settings page after we release the new toolbar.

Launching Next Week!

We're gearing up to launch these new features next Thursday, February 16th at approximately 9:30am CST (GMT-6). Stay tuned to our Twitter and Facebook feeds for more information leading up to the launch.

Much More to Come

We're super excited about this incredible update, but it's actually just a first step toward our really big launch of Project Atkinson, which is coming soon. There's so much good stuff on the way. As always, we appreciate all of your support and look forward to continuing serve as your partner.

For four consecutive years, we've been pleased to be a part of SXSW Interactive, one of the largest gatherings of interactive professionals anywhere. We'll be there again in 2012 and, if you find yourself at SXSW, we hope you'll stop by our booth (number 605) in the Austin Convention Center so we can meet you face to face.

This year's SXSW Interactive Conference takes place March 9-13, 2012 with the trade show firing up on March 12th. As always, there are a ton of sessions and talks to attend on a wide range of topics. You can get all of the information you need about SXSW Interactive here on their website.

The highlight of all highlights, of course, is the opportunity to visit the LightCMS booth, where you'll be able to meet some of our team, get a guided tour of our software, and potentially win some seriously amazing prizes. LightCMS team members attending this year include Marketing Director Tim Wall (that's me), Support Director Chad Jaggers, Creative Director Matthew Sanders, and Software Engineer / Designer Matt Grimm. We're going to have a lot of fun in our booth this year and we hope we'll get to see you there.

Are you going to SXSW 2012? Let us know in the comments below.

Shine the Light! is LightCMS's ongoing program of giving where we partner with web designers around the world to donate websites to deserving non-profit organizations in their communities. Today, I'd like to share with you about one such Shine the Light! project created by Prime Incorporated, a Gold-level LightCMS design company in Bozeman, Montana.

Ben Fjare of Prime Incorporated chose to benefit the Big Brothers Big Sisters of Gallatin County with their donation. Ben was gracious enough to answer a few questions about his Shine the Light! project. See below for more about his great work. First, here's a quick look at the organization's old site, and the new site created by Ben and his team.

Previous Site

New Site

Q&A with Ben Fjare

Tell us a little bit about yourself and your work.
My name is Ben Fjare. I am a co-owner of Prime Incorporated, a small graphic and web design studio located in beautiful Bozeman, Montana. I am currently in charge of all our web design and development, and do most of our coding as well as interface design. We specialize in creative brand and marketing solutions for small to medium-sized businesses, as well as SEO and social media marketing.

Why did you choose this non-profit organization?
I serve on the board of Big Brothers Big Sisters of Gallatin County. The incredible service they do providing mentorship to youth is very important to me. Children who are either part of single parent households or in dysfunctional families are getting positive influences that are statistically shown to greatly increase their chances of success later in life.

What inspires you most about their work?
Every board meeting we have a big, little, or parent come in and discuss how the program has affected them. The stories always start with difficult situations that are less than ideal for a child. However, they always leave me feeling great about what this organization does and how greatly it can change lives. The parents just floor you with amazing stories and praise.

How did you go about addressing the specific needs of this organization?
Communicating what was wrong with the old website was, of course, step one. Then we started stripping out unneeded or excessive content and reformatting anything remaining. Angela, the BBBS-GC marketing director, did a great job of streamlining the information (there is a lot of it). She worked with me to create a structure that was easy to navigate and edit internally. This site is as much her baby as it is mine.

What was unique about this project?
I had never worked on something that was under a national umbrella this large before. It was interesting making sure the branding was in compliance and consistent.

Is there anything else you would like to add?

1. I would like to give a huge shout out to BBBS-GC's staff, board, satellite directors, and most importantly the bigs for all their hard work to help these kids out.
2. The Shine the Light! program is amazing and you guys deserve a big, awkwardly-long hug. Trust me, someday I will collect on this. We love LightCMS here at Prime and we don’t care who knows it. I'll scream it from the top of a mountain, or just type it in all caps on Facebook.
3. If anyone wants to volunteer to help their community I strongly recommend you visit your local Big Brothers Big Sisters office and see what it’s all about. I promise the child’s life is not the only one that is going to benefit.

A Few Words from the Benefited Organization

We also asked Angela Pickett, Marketing and Outreach Coordinator for Big Brothers Big Sisters of Gallatin County, if she would tell us about how this new website is helping her organization. Here's a bit of what she had to say.

"We love the look of our new web site and the fact that it is so easy to work with and update. Our new website helps us share information with our supporters, matches, communities and families. It allows volunteers to sign up and find out about different opportunities to get involved with BBBS. Through our new site, we can be more supportive of our business donors and sponsors and now support them with images and links to their sites. We hope our site will be a place where the community can come back to visit frequently to find any information they need about our organization."

To find out more about how you can participate in LightCMS's Shine the Light! program, please visit our LightCMS giving page.

We rolled a big improvement out the door and down the steps today, one that's been in the testing bay for a couple months.

Wide Open Field

The image editor is the most apparent improvement you'll see when you interact with the text editor.  You'll be welcomed with a larger, cleaner canvas to work on when you click the "Image Editor" icon.

There's something about the wider space, and the cleaner controls, that somehow makes the air around you breathe sweeter.

Cropping is easier than ever now, and you can even add some basic text to your image.  Cool!

Crisis Averted

And now for the thing that will float a lot of your boats: We finally have the ability to resize images to exact pixel dimensions.  No longer will you be forced to use a slider to merely approximate how small you want your image.

Get down to the nitty gritty and specify those pixels like it's a life or death situation.  You've got 10 seconds, and you have to set that image to 818 pixels, or the whole building's gonna blow!

Wild Wild West

This release covers a spate of compatibility improvements and tweaks that have accumulated since the last update.  We're on track keeping this text editor, and the rest of our CMS, up to date with the Wild Wild West of fast-changing browsers.

Last week we rolled out an additional payment feature for the LightCMS store. PayPal Express Checkout can now be enabled alongside PayPal Website Payments Pro. Enabling Express Checkout with your Payments Pro integration means that your customers will be given a choice to "Check out with PayPal" or to check out using the built-in payment process. 

If they click the "Check out with PayPal" button, users will be taken to PayPal's website where they will login and review their transaction before returning to your site. If they check out using our system's built-in process, they will stay on your LightCMS website throughout the entire experience. No matter what the user chooses, payments are still processed through your PayPal Website Payments Pro account and the same PayPal fees apply.

This feature is great for store owners who want to provide a seamless checkout experience on their own website while still providing customers with the option of a separate PayPal checkout experience. To enable it for your website, login and visit Store -> Settings -> Payments -> Payment Gateways. Select "Website Payments Pro" as your credit card payment provider and check the box next to "Enable PayPal Express Checkout."

Every December about this time, we like to take a look back and reflect on all that has happened with LightCMS over the previous year. It's always fun for me to peruse a year's worth of blog posts and remember just how much can happen in a twelve month period. 2011 has been another groundbreaking year for LightCMS. Come with us as we reflect on some of the highlights and take a quick look at what's to come in 2012.

91% Growth

We're happy to report that LightCMS had another incredibly strong year of growth delivering a 91% increase in accounts over the past 12 months. LightCMS's strong growth landed our company on the Inc. 5000, Inc Magazine's list of the 5000 fastest-growing privately-held companies in America, for the fourth consecutive year. We're delighted and honored that so many new customers are choosing LightCMS every day. Our commitment to meeting the needs of every customer with powerful software and outstanding support is stronger than it's ever been.

Year of the Store

Those of you who were with us last year at this time will remember that "Project Tuscany" was the name of the game for the first half of 2011. Tuscany was our code name for the project that brought full e-commerce functionality to the LightCMS platform. We announced the details of Project Tuscany on May 18, 2011 and on June 8, 2011 we took it all live including the integrated store features, a redesigned LightCMS website, the newly-minted LightCMS Designer Program, brand-new e-commerce design templates, and a completely revamped support site for LightCMS customers.

This was the biggest infusion of new features in the history of the LightCMS platform, making 2011 a year that will forever be of great significance for LightCMS.

Additional Milestones

Though the store and store-related features dominated 2011, there were certainly other developments of note as well. Our Shine the Light! program continued, offering LightCMS designers the opportunity to partner with us and donate websites to deserving non-profit organizations. In fact, LightCMS's Shine the Light program even won the Beacon Award for Philanthropic Impact by a small business. If you haven't become a part of Shine the Light! yet, we encourage you to do so in 2012.

We also exhibited LightCMS at SXSW in Austin for the third consecutive year (and we'll be making our fourth appearance this year). We launched a new and improved design viewer to easily display all of LightCMS's available free templates, and to make it easy for our designer partners to do so in a white-label way. We introduced groundbreaking comment moderation and spam filtering to the LightCMS blog element, and we developed the LightCMS T-shirt Store, where we now make all of our company shirts available for purchase.

A Look Ahead

As great as 2011 has been, we believe the outlook for 2012 is even brighter. I know it sounds trite to say, but for us it is true. Every year we expect even greater things from ourselves, our products, and our service to our customers. The new year will be no exception.

Just like last year, we've got a major project underway that's due to be launched in the first half of the new year. This one is code named "Project Atkinson." Our development team has been working feverishly on Atkinson for many months. It is another major development that will make a huge impact on LightCMS. We can't wait to unveil it to you in the new year, so stay tuned!

Thanks to all of you for your continued support of LightCMS. We truly value your business and your partnership and look forward to working with you for years to come. Thank you all for a great 2011 and here's to an even better 2012!

LightCMS offers a huge selection of freely available designs that are ready to use and can be applied to your LightCMS website with a click. You can also download the source files for these designs to use as starting points for your own work.

To see all of our freely available designs, check out our design viewer. This week, we've added eight new designs to the mix. See them below. These are all available when you visit "Website -> Designs" inside your LightCMS account.

Shark

Life Fellowship

Big Lake

Second Street

RSAccounting

Lone Cross

AES Architecture

Venture Church

We released a nifty new feature today. It's the "Archive By Year" blog skin. We've had our "Archive By Month" blog skin for awhile, but for blogs that may not post as frequently, dividing posts up into months isn't always ideal. So, now you have the option to provide an archive by year instead.

To use the new skin, simply visit the settings for your blog element and choose the "Archive By Year" skin. For more information, see the blog skins section of our user guide.

Another addition to our list of supported payment processors went live this week. Now you can accept credit card payments through your LightCMS store via PayPal's Website Payments Pro.

Pro vs. Standard

We've always had support for PayPal's Website Payments Standard, so what's the difference with Pro? The biggest difference is that Pro allows your customers to complete their entire checkout experience on your LightCMS website, without being directed offsite to PayPal's own checkout pages.

Just like Standard, Pro offers you a one-stop shop for all payment processing. Rather than having to have a separate merchant account and gateway, Website Payments Pro wraps it all up in one system and since it's PayPal, it's likely a system you're already familiar with.

The pricing structure is different with Pro as compared to Standard. Pro assesses a monthly fee but offers discounted transaction fees based on volume of sales. So, stores that generate more sales may find Pro to be more advantageous in pricing, but that decision must be made by you based on your store's situation.

Get more information about Website Payments Pro, its benefits and its pricing structure here on the PayPal website.

Ready to Integrate

Once you have a Website Payments Pro account, all it takes is plugging a few pieces of information into the LightCMS system and you'll be up and running. Simply log into your LightCMS site and visit Store -> Settings -> Payments then check the box that says "Enable credit card payments" and select "Website Payments Pro" from the list of processors. If you need help, you may contact our support team at any time at support@lightcms.com.

In case you haven't yet checked out the LightCMS T-Shirt Store, we're offering you even more incentive to give it a look. Through the end of the year, you can get 25% off any purchase in our store.

Use Promo Code 2011SALE When Checking Out To Claim Your Savings
Visit Now »

Big Savings On All Of Our Shirts

We now offer thirteen unique shirt designs including the very popular "Web Designers Are Sexy" shirt series (version 1 | version 2) that has been a part of LightCMS trade show appearances for several years. All shirts are custom-designed by one of our own, talented designers and most are printed on American Apparel products. Every shirt in our store can be purchased at 25% off through the end of 2011 and every shirt includes free shipping anywhere in the US.

New Fall 2011 Shirt Now Available

We've added yet another shirt to the store just this week. Our Fall 2011 design is hot off the presses and now available for purchase. As always, our very own IT Director, Chad, posed for a few pictures to demonstrate how good one can look in this new shirt while performing a variety of tasks such as staring into space and performing minor commercial construction projects.

Just In Time For the Holidays

Nothing will delight your friends and loved ones more than waking up Christmas morning to discover they have received an entire wardrobe full of Element Fusion and LightCMS apparel! Make their dreams come true and take advantage of these great savings while they last. Remember, use promo code 2011SALE to claim your discount.