We're excited to bring another fantastic, mobile-friendly, responsive design to the LightCMS platform. Origami is our newest addition and it's available at no cost inside your LightCMS account. Check out images and more details below.

As with all of our recent designs, Origami offers a fully responsive display that adapts to fit beautifully in browsers of any width, whether on desktop computers, tablets, or smartphones. To check it out, log in to your website and click "Design" on the top toolbar. Then click "Gallery" and look for Origami in the list of featured designs. It only takes a click to preview the design, apply it to your website, or even download the source code to modify on your own. Plus, as always, you can customize the design in the LightCMS Design Editor as well.

Making beautiful, creative websites accessible to everyone is a primary goal of LightCMS. With built-in designs and our easy-to-use design editor, thousands of customers set up fantastic websites on their own. But sometimes our customers are looking for a little something extra, from assistance with the set up process to full-scale custom website design. The LightCMS Professionals Program aims to connect our customers with experienced LightCMS designers who can provide them with the services they need.

Get the Help You Need

Now you can easily find an experienced LightCMS designer to assist you with your LightCMS project. Every LightCMS Professional has proven their experience with our platform. Browse through our Professionals listing and you'll be able to see examples of each Professional's work, their price range, location and more. When you find a Professional you'd like to work with, simply click the contact button on their listing, fill out the form, and we'll send your details to them immediately. Contacting a Professional doesn't obligate you to anything. The Professional will simply get in touch to discuss your project, answer your questions, and offer a proposal. Then, you get to decide if you wish to proceed.

Custom Design or LightCMS Setup

Currently, LightCMS Professionals offer two types of services. The first is Custom Design, which can include a range of services that vary by provider. Some Professionals may offer fixed-price Custom Design packages while other may charge by the hour. Each Professional will be able to provide details about their Custom Design services. In any case, Custom Design provides you the opportunity to get a beautiful and world-class look that's tailored to meet your needs.

The second service Professionals can choose to offer is called LightCMS Setup. Setup is a fantastic, time-saving service offered at a fixed price of $500. LightCMS Setup takes care of all the details of setting up your LightCMS website such as applying a built-in design, tailoring it to your brand with the Design Editor, adjusting settings for your website and store, and even building out your home page content. You can see if a Professional offers LightCMS Setup by looking at their Professionals listing.

Become a Professional

If you're an experienced LightCMS designer who would like to offer your services to LightCMS customers, you can apply to the LightCMS Professionals program as well. Simply visit our Professionals page to get the details and to complete the application form.

This week, we've rolled out a couple new features we'd like to tell you about. One adds functionality to the built-in LightCMS Design Editor and the other adds options for those who code their own designs. Check out the details below.

Expanded Background Control Through the Design Editor

The Design Editor allows you to control the color and image used as the background for your website with its simple-to-use tools. This functionality was previously limited to the base styles of the website, meaning you could only control the background for the whole site, not for individual sections of a site.

Now, we've expanded background control to all areas editable through the Design Editor. So, for example, you can adjust the background color of the navigation bar or set an image to serve as the background of your sidebar. Any area that can be controlled by the Design Editor can now have its background color and/or image adjusted.

Dynamic Body Classes

Those who code their own designs for LightCMS are going to love this new addition. We're now automatically adding dynamic body classes to certain special pages throughout the LightCMS system. Here's a list of the new dynamic body classes and how they are applied.

• dynamic-shoppingcart - added to the shopping cart page (/shoppingcart)
• dynamic-productdetail - added to all product detail pages
• dynamic-blogdetail - added to all blog post detail pages
• dynamic-tags - added to all blog tag pages
• dynamic-calendardetail - added to all event detail pages
• dynamic-login - added to the log in screen (/login)
• dynamic-searchresults - added to all search results pages
• dynamic-404 - added to all 404 error pages
• dynamic-sitemap - added to the sitemap page (/sitemap)

These new dynamic body classes can serve several purposes, but most significantly they can reduce the number of HTML files in your LightCMS designs. As you know, LightCMS allows you to include special HTML templates to control the output of many of these same pages. Now, in many cases, you can get by using a single template (such as Inside.html) while targeting these dynamic body classes and using CSS styles to adjust their layout as desired.

If you're confused about dynamic body classes, don't worry. This is an advanced feature designed for those who code their own LightCMS designs. You can get more information in our documentation for creating designs, or feel free to contact us with any questions you may have.

We're excited to bring another fantastic, mobile-friendly, responsive design to the LightCMS platform. Slate is our newest addition and it's available at no cost inside your LightCMS account. Check out images and more details below.

Slate is a beautifully intuitive template created over months of planning and design, with each element of the CMS handcrafted in its display. Slate features some stunning extras such as a highly-polished sidebar region on its homepage which can be used to create a sophisticated display of recent blog posts, upcoming calendar events, and more.

As with all of our recent designs, Slate offers a fully responsive display that adapts to fit beautifully in browsers of any width, whether on desktop computers, tablets, or smartphones. "What about the iPhone 5 and its wider screen when viewed in landscape mode?" you ask. Not a problem for responsive designs like this one, which automatically adjust their layouts to accommodate any screen size.

We are sure that businesses and organizations of all types will find Slate a simple and smart tool for creating a refined website. To check it out, log in to your website and click "Design" on the top toolbar. Then click "Gallery" and look for Slate in the list of featured designs. It only takes a click to preview the design, apply it to your website, or even download the source code to modify on your own. Plus, as always, you can customize the design in the LightCMS Design Editor as well.

More designs are on the way, so stay tuned!

We've updated three of our freely-available LightCMS designs to comply with our mobile-friendly, responsive approach. Devon-Cornerway, Devon-Poster, and Devon-Verdure have been a part of our system for some time, but they have been completely re-engineered to offer a fully-responsive design experience that adjusts dynamically and looks great on any device from smartphones to tablets to high-resolution displays. Check out the designs in the screenshots below.

You can access these designs along with all of our included designs by logging into your LightCMS website and clicking the "Design" link on the top toolbar. From there, look for the "Gallery" link to access our built-in gallery, filled with hundreds of designs that can be applied as is to your website and customized with our built-in Design Editor. Of course, you can also download the source code of any design and use it as a starting place for your own work.

Stay tuned. There's much more to come...