We are in the business of helping designers and design agencies succeed and grow. This is precisely the reason why we launched the LightCMS Developer Program more than a year ago. The Developer Program enables designers and resellers to focus on what they do best in creating leading-edge websites with a standards-based platform that does not require special programming languages while offloading server maintenance, hosting and upgrades to us.

Sarah Hokuf, the founder of Evolve Creative, a website design and branding agency, likes how LightCMS empowers web designers to showcase their creativtity in building websites with powerful visual impact. But Hokuf has also found that LightCMS also offers great flexibility on the technical development side of site creation. “WordPress developers might see LightCMS as simpler and want more advanced features, but I feel there’s nothing you can’t do in development with LightCMS,” said Hokuf.

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those responsible for ecommerce either scrambling to keep up or simply resigned to the fact that they’re running an outdated site.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.

We're very pleased to kick off this week and this month with some very exciting new features. The first of these is a very highly-requested addition that will be a fantastic benefit for LightCMS customers and for our design partners and their clients. Take a look below to check out everything that's new.

We're releasing two new, fully-responsive designs today. As always, these designs are available to be used on any LightCMS website at no extra charge. They are customizable through our built in Design Editor.

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...

Today, we’re pleased to announce that we’ve added ten new, responsive designs to the LightCMS system. As always, these designs are available to be used on any LightCMS website at no extra charge. They are customizable through our built in Design Editor and advanced users can even download their source code to use them as starting points for their own designs.

We're adding another fantastic, mobile-friendly, responsive design to the LightCMS platform. Grasp is our newest addition and it's available free inside your LightCMS account. Check out images and more details below.

Collision Media is a LightCMS Professionals partner based in Nashville, Tenn. who has built its business around the LightCMS content management system to create more than 200 websites (and counting) for clients — many of them churches, ministries and non-profit organizations. Like many web design agencies, Collision Media started out working with open source platforms such as WordPress and Joomla, but quickly realized these systems were incapable of meeting its needs.

If you're like many creative professionals in a design business, you're probably not as focused as you should be on growing your company. You'd rather work on your next great design than call former customers to ask for a referral. But without those calls and referrals, the business won't last long.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This week, we're adding two new mobile-friendly, responsive designs to the LightCMS platform plus a nice little feature on the LightCMS store. Check out the designs and the details below. Two New Designs Spread and Vanity are the names of two new designs now available inside your LightCMS account (see screenshots above).

As we mentioned last week, we have plans to bring several new designs to the LightCMS platform over the coming months, and our focus with all of these designs will be on responsive, mobile-friendly layouts. Today we're adding three of these new designs to the platform and making them freely available for anyone to use. They are known as Great-Air, Great-Goods, and Great-Scape.

That's right, this week is so hot we're rolling out two great updates in just a few days. Monday, we told you about the new ESC Hotkey and today we're excited to introduce you to LightCMS's new mobile-friendly default template, now with a fully responsive design optimized for display on iPad, iPhone, Android and more. The New, Responsive Haus Template Haus has been the default design for LightCMS for about six months, and today we're giving it a significant upgrade.

Another sizzling-hot week, another sizzling-hot feature. That's how we roll with the Summer of Love. This week, we've got some new goodies for those of you who like to code and tweak and tinker with your own designs on LightCMS.

As you may know, we run our own online store where we sell a selection of T-shirts we've created over the years. This store naturally runs on the LightCMS platform which gives us another great opportunity to use our own software in a real-world setting. We recently decided it was time to redesign the store website.

Yesterday, we rolled out the last major piece of the LightCMS Design Editor — background image editing. We began phasing in the Design Editor a couple of months ago and this update marks the last phase of that rollout. For a refresher on the Design Editor itself, check out our previous announcement of the Design Editor.

Another phase of our design area enhancement is rolling out this week. The Developer Role will allow LightCMS account owners to grant design-management capabilities to other users of their website. Businesses and organizations will be able to allow multiple staff members to have access to design controls.

We're continuing the roll out of design changes we began last month with a complete overhaul of the LightCMS Design Section. This release presents a stunning user interface that makes managing your designs so much easier. The update paves the way for the new Developer Role (coming soon) which will permit account owners to allow users of their choosing to access the Design Section controls.

Today, I want to take a closer look at the new LightCMS Design Editor, which we began rolling out last week. The Design Editor offers the opportunity to make changes to the design of a LightCMS website without editing any code. The Design Editor works out of the box with all of LightCMS's built-in designs.

Alongside the roll out of our new Design Editor, we've also launched a new version of the LightCMS website. We're very exited about the new site, which represents yet another big step forward for LightCMS's brand and marketing.  Of course, you may be reading this post on the new LightCMS website and, if so, you've already seen this new design, but if not, you can take a look at it in the screenshot below and at www.lightcms.com. Though much of our content remains the same in this version, i...

Today, we're excited to announce a groundbreaking new addition to LightCMS — the new Design Editor. This new tool makes design customization accessible to everyone, even to web novices, with a what-you-see-is-what-you-get editing interface anyone can use. Using the new design editor, you can easily modify and customize any of our built-in website designs with simple to use tools.

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.

As we've discussed in the past, it can sometimes be advantageous to base new designs on existing designs or themes. Naturally, this is a less time intensive approach than fully custom design and, as a result, it can allow designers to offer lower-priced services to companies or organizations who may not be able to afford fully-custom options. And while most would prefer completely custom work, good results can still be achieved when talented designers customize existing, quality designs.

About Creatovision "Our vision is clear: We're quite simply a team of highly creative and experienced designers who focus on communicating your brand to the customer down the street or on the other side of the world." Location: Orange County, CA Website: http://www.creatovision.com/ Primary contact: Justin Juknelis Samples of Creatovision's work: Q & A How does LightCMS make things easier for your business? With LightCMS, we've been able to turn websites around much more efficiently tha...

Earlier this week, I was with a friend who was setting up a site for a client of his on LightCMS. The client's budget was limited, and his needs pushed the limits of that budget. While a large portion of clients fit this description, it can be difficult to make a living off of time-consuming projects with low profit.

While developing our online store, we also developed some great free designs that are specifically intended for Ecommerce. These designs have: Layouts built specifically with an online store in mind Product detail pages for customized product display Shopping cart tokens coded into the HTML As with all of our free designs, you can use them as is, resell them as is, or customize them for you own needs for free — as long as you use them on LightCMS. If you’re the kind of person that likes to see a...

The following is an article written by Ethan, one of our designers / developers, exploring a source of his web design inspiration from modern art. It's a great example of how other industries feed into the field of web design. We hope you enjoy!