Managing 100's of Custom-Designed Sites

As part of Website Magazine's Web Masters tech interview series, spotlighting product and service providers helping to accelerate the 'Net success of industry professionals, we caught up with LightCMS Founder Justin Cowan to get insights on his company's offerings as well as challenges and opportunities facing the content management space - some of which might surprise you.

An intuitive, easy-to-use cloud-based content management system (CMS), LightCMS is used by small and medium-sized businesses to create websites and online stores. Unlike others on the market (think Squarespace), however, LightCMS focuses on providing Web designers and agencies with a multi-site architecture that has, according to Cowan, unified administrator access across accounts, combined with a business toolkit that extends to helping them bill their customers and process payments.

"We make the process of handling hundreds of clients a breeze for our developer partners," said Cowan.

Here are some quick hits about the LightCMS offering as answered by Cowan:

Who are your competitors?

Open source solutions primarily. On an individual site or one that is highly customized, an open source platform will work great. However, for the designer or Web design firm that is managing or wants to build their customer base up to 50-plus clients and take advantage of huge savings in both time and support, a platform like LightCMS is ideal. We have a number of husband and wife teams and Web agencies like Collision Media who are managing hundreds of custom-designed client sites.

Areas impacting content management...

Mobile will continue to grow and account for the majority of website traffic in the coming years. If businesses aren't able to provide customers with a mobile-optimized experience, they are going to be left behind. This is why LightCMS offers a huge selection of CMS designs built with responsive Web design capabilities that automatically adapt across all devices.

Additionally, we are seeing a shift from the use of traditional hosting and installed software to cloud platforms as businesses are seeking ways to remove their IT burden. By running in the cloud, businesses can focus on growing and innovating, not maintaining servers and dealing with time consuming and frustrating software upgrades.

How will your services change in the short- and long-term?

We'll continue to scale with features, but not complexity. We'll evolve our tools to stay simple, yet powerful, and become more unified across the platform. An end-user who wants to manage their content shouldn't need an extensive user manual or help site. They should be able to just log in, navigate to the page and make their changes intuitively.

What are current trends impacting your business?

Constantly improving the UI away from a fragmented collection of admin pages to a more unified app-like experience. We improve on this daily, and all of the major commercial platforms are making this priority number one.