Let’s imagine for a moment that you’re one of the lucky designers. You’ve managed to navigate a large design project and you’re close to delivering the final site. It’s integrated with a CMS, and the client is going to take over from here on out.

No doubt, you have a list of your favorite tools you use to help streamline your website business workflow, but there is always room for a few more! Below is a list of the top 10 free tools you may already be using or should take a look at to help improve your website business. If any of your favorites aren’t listed here, please share them in the comment section.

Website design trends are constantly evolving, often leaving those responsible for ecommerce either scrambling to keep up or simply resigned to the fact that they’re running an outdated site. But keeping the online shopping experience fresh does not require a complex and costly tear-down every year to meet shifting preferences. Following these five design tips will help to create fresh, modern storefronts for your clients that their customers can access anytime, anywhere.

The design of your organization's website is a bit like the layout of a retail store. You want customers to find it attractive and accessible, fun to browse but also efficient for those who want to buy and check out quickly. Unfortunately, designers often make mistakes when creating the look and feel of their company's site.

The images on your company’s website have a big impact on visitors and are often their first impression of your business. So they need to be professional, up-to-date and fast. You want vibrant images and rich graphics, but if you have too many they can slow the site’s performance.

You love designing websites, not dealing with invoices and conducting server maintenance. That is why you became a LightCMS partner in the first place, right? The LightCMS cloud-based content management and web design platform was set up to make it easier for designers to focus on the creative aspects of their business rather than getting bogged down in the operational details.

There is a lot you may want to share with your website visitors. But not all of it can, or should, be shared equally. Here are some basic, but critical, tips on web content organization and management.

Providing a good web experience depends heavily on good use of navigational aids. While it sounds simple enough, in fact, designing good navigational elements on a site can be tricky. Here are four common mistakes to avoid: Too many levels.

Hiring is possibly the biggest growth opportunity for any web design company. The smaller the firm, the more each new person can contribute in terms of skill, contacts, professional image and team motivation. Of course, hiring a new person represents both potential income, possible risk and certain cost.

Finding and maintaining a healthy work/life balance is a never-ending challenge for almost everyone. Finding that balance is especially difficult for those who run their own businesses, and if they aren’t careful, their businesses may have a tendency to run them. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

In nearly every circumstance, simplicity is better than complexity. Luckily for those in the web design business, LightCMS makes it very simple to start or grow your business with the new LightCMS Partner Platform. Here’s a quick and easy guide to help you get started.

Your customers are coming to your website over a myriad of devices, from smartphones to tablets to desktops, and the range will likely grow as smaller devices and different sizes of screens come onto the market. To ensure that all of these devices can get full functionality from your site and that your team isn't wasting time creating multiple versions of your main site to accommodate each device, you need to integrate responsive design techniques into your web design. Responsive web design is a...

When prospects search for products like yours, do they find you or your competitors? Getting to the top of the search engine rankings seems like an impossible task to many marketing managers. But it's neither complicated nor expensive.

One of our most popular white-label videos, entitled "Getting Started Managing Your Website," has been updated to bring the visuals up to date with our recent interface changes. You can view the updated version of our Getting Started video below: Automatically Updated in Our Reseller Scripts If you use our reseller marketing scripts to share marketing content on your own sites, you won't need to update anything. The Getting Started video has already been swapped out with the new version in our R...

In case you didn't know, we offer several helpful videos about using LightCMS. Many of these videos are white-labeled, meaning they are designed for you to be able to share them with your own clients. One of our most popular videos, entitled "Getting Started Managing Your Website," has recently been updated to bring the visuals up to date with some of the changes recently implemented on the LightCMS platform.

Today we're releasing a brand new white-label video resource that you can use in promoting the CMS to your own clients. This video gives a quick overview and demonstration of the new Online Store functionality that's built right into LightCMS. Check out the new video below: This video joins our collection of white-label videos that have always been available for you to use.

The LightCMS Network page is one of the many ways we promote the work of our participating resellers. To participate, they simply need to be a member of our rewards program and to opt in through their account settings to be publicly promoted through us. And so the Network page has become a great tool for us to promote LightCMS resellers and web professionals familiar with the LightCMS system.

In case you didn't know, LightCMS provides free, unbranded marketing resources that designers can use to promote the CMS system to their own clients. We offer several unbranded video demos and tutorials, as well as scripts that can inject marketing content into your own websites. If you don't currently make use of these resources, be sure to check them out on our marketing help page.

As designers we’ve all experienced those same dreaded moments when we're working on a design and hit a road block. Maybe it's been a long day, and your brain is just fried. Maybe you’ve already done three designs this week and you just don’t have anything left.

If you're like most designers, you've probably spent at least some time looking over the new features of "HTML5" and considering if or when you should switch over to it. Inevitably you're going to also run into the topic of CSS3. The changes can seem intimidating at first, but there are a lots of great reasons to start using the new features.

Have you started using HTML5 in your Light CMS designs yet? One reason to switch over to HTML5 now is that the updates to the language have made it more semantic—meaning, reading the HTML5 code is more intuitive if you don’t already know what you’re looking at. And Light CMS, unlike many other CMS platforms, gives you complete control over your design code.

The increasing importance of interactivity in a website's design and interface has caused the use of jQuery to skyrocket in the past years. While many have found that raw JavaScript is too clunky or intimidating to approach, jQuery is well-known for being intuitive, lightweight, and easy to use. To help encourage you to explore the many great uses of jQuery in building dynamic websites on LightCMS, we've put together the best resources we've seen from a variety of reliable sources across the web...