Along with the launch of our built-in online store functionality (see the previous post), the LightCMS website has been completely redesigned and restructured. It now sports an updated visual aesthetic as well as changes to its overall page layout to make it even easier to navigate. The changes include an updated features section, a new designers section with information about the LightCMS Designer program, as well as an on-site support section including improved design documentation. There are a host of other improvements that we encourage you to see for yourself!

The redesign has already been featured on several popular design-related sites, such as CSSMania and Line25. And for their hard work, we're immensely proud of our team!

Element Fusion Donates More Than a Dozen LightCMS Subscriptions to Non-Profit Organizations in 2010

OKLAHOMA CITY –  Element Fusion, developer of premier Web content management system LightCMS, introduces its Shine the Light! program, a philanthropic initiative to encourage Web designers to give back to their communities. When a LightCMS Web design reseller donates time to design a Web site for a non-profit organization of their choice, LightCMS steps in to provide the non-profit with its powerful, Web-based tools, hosting, and support for an entire calendar year, free of charge. LightCMS has donated 14 pro bono projects over the past year and plans to double that number in 2011.

Recent Shine the Light! recipient Sean Lukasik, freelance designer of CreAgent Marketing and adjunct professor at Corning Community College in Corning, New York, leveraged Shine the Light! to host a competition among students in his Web design classes. Under his guidance, Lukasik’s students utilized LightCMS to develop and launch an actual Web site for a pre-selected local non-profit, the Orchestra of the Southern Finger Lakes. The Web site project helped students learn about Web design via the state-of-the-art LightCMS platform. Student winner Derek Slife gained hands-on experience, while giving back to local community arts initiatives.

“Through LightCMS’s Shine the Light! program, my students donated their time and expertise to a local non-profit, while working with a professional program that provided all of the design, hosting and management tools they needed to create a creative, functional site – completely free for the Orchestra of the Southern Finger Lakes,” says Sean Lukasik.

Recognizing the need for Web design amongst non-profit organizations, LightCMS gives its resellers the ability to design a Web site for the non-profit of their choice. Once a non-profit is selected and a designer donates his or her time, LightCMS steps in to provide the non-profit with free access to its entire system and array of tools. Neither the non-profit nor the designer ever have to worry about hosting configurations or software upgrades, and the robust Web-based tools allow the organization to easily manage its site’s content.

“We’re excited to be able to create an outlet for designers to donate their design expertise and provide a service for non-profits,” says Tim Wall, Director of Product Marketing with LightCMS. “Using LightCMS, Web designers have a sophisticated Web design platform that gives them the necessary tools and hosting needed to create a high quality Web site for an organization that may not otherwise have the financial means.”

To participate in LightCMS’s Shine the Light! program, Web designers must be enrolled in the LightCMS Rewards programs. When designers reach a bronze level ($100 in recurring revenue using LightCMS), they become eligible to support one Shine the Light! project per calendar year. Click here more information on LightCMS’s Shine the Light! program.

Our Shine the Light! program (available through our LightCMS product) was highlighted by The Wall Street Journal last week. The Journal ran a story about small businesses with New Years resolutions, and mentioned our own resolution to double the number of websites we donate through our Shine the Light! program in 2011. We donated ten Shine the Light! websites in 2010 and we plan to make that twenty in 2011. Of course, we can't do it without the help of our LightCMS customers, who partner with us to donate their own design services, creating a complete website package for our non-profit beneficiaries.

If you're a LightCMS designer, we hope you'll consider participating with us through Shine the Light! this year.

It's that time again. Time look take a look back at all that's happened this year and look ahead with anticipation for all of the great things to come.

2010 was an amazing year for Element Fusion. It was the year our company turned Ten Years Strong, and with that milestone came another step in our transformation from local web design shop to international web software company. Consolidating our products into two brands, LightCMS and Radium3, makes us stronger, better positions us to meet the needs of our current customers, and opens the doors to accelerated growth in the years to come.

Recognition of our company's strong growth continued in 2010, landing us on the Inc. 5000 list of the fastest growing companies in America for the third consecutive year and Oklahoma City's Metro 50 for the fifth consecutive year. We're very pleased with the opportunity to celebrate strong growth in the midst of a struggling economy, a major business transition, and while continuing to maintain an investor-free and debt-free position.

Perhaps the most exciting number to share is the number of websites we were able to donate in 2010. Through our Website Giveaway program now running on Radium3, we selected four non-profit organizations to receive complete website design packages and free hosting on the Radium3 system. But additionally, through LightCMS's Shine the Light! program, we partnered with designers all over the world to provide an additional ten non-profits with free websites. That's a total of fourteen donated non-profit websites in 2010, which is by far the most we have been able to accomplish in a single year.

2010 has been a great year, but we look forward to an even better year in 2011. We're currently working on a massive project which we've code-named Project Tuscany. This project, to be released in 2011, promises to be the most significant upgrade to our product line yet. In addition to Tuscany, we'll be hard at work on a host of other features and, as always, at providing the exceptional level of customer service you've come to expect from us. Hold onto your hats because it's going to be another great year!

Last night, representatives from Element Fusion attended the awards dinner for the Greater Oklahoma City Chamber of Commerce’s Metro 50. This annual event honors the 50 fastest-growing, privately-held companies in the Oklahoma City metro area. This is Element Fusion’s 5th consecutive year to make the list and we are, once again, honored to be listed among so many great companies. Based on the Metro 50's calculation of revenue growth over the previous two-year period, Element Fusion came in at #47.

We were also excited to see several companies on the list that we’ve worked with as clients over the years. Congratulations to them and to all of the great Oklahoma City businesses that made the list.

Here are some pics from the event. I apologize for the dim lighting, but my lowly iPhone 3Gs doesn’t have the fancy flash and HDR capabilities of the newfangled iPhone 4. Ah, well.

 
Usually, we post a picture of our owners, Ryan Whitaker (left) and Justin Cowan (middle). This time, Chad (right) crashed the picture in order to ensure he would make it on the blog.

Here’s Vivian (Internet Marketing Specialist) and Travis (Senior Consultant) taking a break from using their iPhones in order to smile for the camera.

Here's Neill and Joseph (developers) not taking a break from Neill's iPhone in order to smile at the camera.

And here’s the cheesecake I ate.

Inc. Magazine has announced its annual listing of the 5,000 fastest growing private companies in America. We’re pleased to announce that Element Fusion has made the list for our third consecutive year.

This year’s list tracks growth across the three year span from 2006-2009. During that period, Element Fusion saw an increase in revenue of 81%, landing us at #2,774 out of all private companies in the US and #24 out of the 34 Oklahoma-based companies that made the list.

As you can see, the period measured encompasses the great recession our economy has suffered recently. Inc. points out that finding growth in companies has proved itself more difficult this time around:

"It will probably comes as no surprise to savvy Inc. readers that it's not as easy to find growing companies as it was a couple years ago. In 2008, the second year of Inc.'s expanded list of 5,000 growing privately-held companies, there was much enthusiasm as firms across the country showed eagerness to be part of our list. The three-year growth rate of the company at the No. 5,000 rank doubled from 20 percent in 2007 to 40 percent in 2008. This year, the enthusiasm was still there, but very often, the growth was not. Our measuring period of 2006 through 2009 encompasses the recession, which economists say started in December of 2007 and lasted through the end of last year. Poignantly, many firms applied for this year's list even though their 2009 revenue was less than that of 2006.”

- from "Finding Growth in a Recession" by Jim Melloan

These sobering reflections on the state of our economy make us ever more grateful for the support you all have shown us which has resulted in our continued growth over this difficult time period. We truly are humbled and honored to have you as our customers and we look forward to continuing to serve you for years to come.

Oklahoma City's NBC affiliate KFOR produced and aired a two minute feature on Element Fusion this week as a part of its "Is this a great State or what?" series. The segment highlights our company's history and gives a nice look inside the Element Fusion offices. We'd like to thank Galen Culver and the KFOR team for putting this together. You can check out the full feature below.

This is the year we celebrate Element Fusion’s ten year anniversary and we’re inviting you to join us at our Anniversary Open House on March 5, 2010 from 1:30pm to 4:30pm (come and go as you please). If you’re in the area, we’d love for you to stop by.

That’s right, attendees will have a chance to win one of our fantastic door prizes including several restaurant gift cards and one brand new iPod touch! Plus, we’ll have food, complimentary chair massages, and an open game room for shuffleboard and Rock Band match ups. And the first 40 people through the door will get a free, premium, limited edition Element Fusion T-shirt.

Check out our official Open House Invitation for full details. You can view it online and even share it with your friends and co-workers. All are welcome to attend.

Mark your calendars now, and if you have any questions, please just let us know.

Oklahoma’s largest newspaper, The Oklahoman, featured an executive Q&A with one of Element Fusion's owners and founders, Ryan Whitaker, in its Sunday edition on January 24th. The article offers a bit of Element Fusion history and then dives into a personal question and answer session with Ryan on topics ranging from his business ideals to his hobbies.

If you haven’t had a chance to read it yet, you can click here to read it at NewsOK.com. Check it out.

Do you remember what the Internet was like ten years ago? Websites were far less common. Email was just taking hold. But excitement about this new medium was building.

At that time, three Oklahoma City entrepreneurs sat around a fold-out card table eating Papa John's pizza and looking ahead, envisioning a company that would bring world-class website development to Oklahoma City and beyond. Ten years ago, Element Fusion was born.

Ten years later, we are ready to celebrate this fantastic milestone. So, we created a little something we like to call “Element Fusion, ten years strong.” Why “ten years strong,” you ask? Because for us, it’s more than just being ten years old. For us, it’s about the strength of what’s been built – a solid, debt-free foundation coupled with rapid growth. As we always say, our company and our products are built to last.

So anyway, on to the celebrations. We’ve got a lot of great things in store that you’ll be hearing about throughout this coming year, but here’s a little overview to get you started.

The Anniversary Website

We’ve put up a little web page at 10.elementfusion.com to house information about the anniversary. You’ll also find links to this page in little badges we’ve added to the top, right corner of most of our marketing websites (including this site). Check out the anniversary site for a little bit about our history and more information about the anniversary.

The Anniversary Open House

Join us at the Element Fusion offices on March 5th, 2010 for this special party. We’ll have food, t-shirts, prizes (including an iPod Touch giveaway!), Rock Band tournaments and a whole lot more when you stop by between 1:30pm and 4:30pm. All are welcome to come and go as you please. Our whole team looks forward to meeting everyone and hanging out at the Anniversary Open House.

The Anniversary Giveaways

We’re ramping up our Website Giveaway program for 2010. We’ll be running the program four times through the year, giving away four separate website packages valued at $5,000 each to four separate non-profit organizations. As usual, we will implement a process of nominations and public voting to help select the winners so stay tuned for more information as these giveaways get going.

Stay tuned

We’ll be posting more information about all of these activities throughout the year, so stay tuned to our blog and Twitter feed for further information. As always, thank you for your support of Element Fusion over the past ten years. We look forward to serving you for the next ten years and beyond.

Last night, the Element Fusion team, spouses and guests had a grand party to kick off our ten year anniversary celebration. That’s right, Element Fusion has now been in business for ten years, and we’ve got some great things planned in 2010 to celebrate this milestone. Stay tuned for more in the weeks to come.

To get things started in style, we got together in the “Showroom” at Red Prime Steak in downtown Oklahoma City for an evening of food and fun. Great food, live jazz, an EF history trivia contest, Chad’s brilliant emcee efforts, and funny stories from EF’s past all made for a great evening. To cap it off, owners Ryan Whitaker and Justin Cowan shared their thoughts on the past ten years, our present team, and a look ahead to the next ten years and beyond.

I thought we’d share a little taste of last night’s event with you in some pics below. Enjoy!

Chad engages and dazzles the crowd as the evening’s emcee.

Owner, Justin Cowan, goes over some of his favorite Element Fusion memories.

Tim Thompson (bass) and Adam Ray (sax/keys) did a great job filling in as last minute emergency replacements for our scheduled band. Oh, and hey look, it’s me sitting in on keys for this one song.

One of our lovely tables of guests including (left to right) Neill and Amanda Harmer, Vivian Hoang, Matt Sanders, Matt Grimm, and Jordan Romero. For some reason, Matt Sanders is the only one with food.

The end of 2009 is upon us and, as is our custom, we'd like a take a quick look back at what has happened this year at Element Fusion. We're very blessed to have enjoyed a successful and prosperous year and we are grateful to all of you for your support of our company and our products.

Our amazing team

Our company's success has always been dependent on the quality people who work on our team. We close out 2009 with our team as strong as ever. Every one of our employees are innovators in their fields and every one of them go above and beyond to meet the needs of our customers.

Our team has also been quite productive personally with three pregnancies and three engagements for 2009. I should mention that none of the engagements are related to any of the pregnancies.

Solid growth

Element Fusion continued its pattern of solid growth throughout 2009. While maintaining our commitment to debt-free operations we achieved exciting growth numbers. For example, the number of paid websites across all of our CMS products doubled in 2009. Our growth was recognized nationally as Element Fusion was listed on the Inc. 5000 for the second consecutive year. Locally, we were honored as a part of the Oklahoma City Metro 50 for the fourth consecutive year.

We also received recognition at the 2009 Beacon Awards, presented by the Journal Record newspaper. This honor recognized Element Fusion's philanthropic efforts through our recently established website giveaway program.

Ten years strong

The end of this decade also means Element Fusion's 10th anniversary. Since we were founded at the end of 1999, we are closing out our first ten years in business. We're excited to reach this milestone and we have some fun things in store for 2010 to aid the celebration. So, stay tuned and be watching for more about Element Fusion, ten years strong.

Here's to the future

In closing, we'd just like to offer our sincere thanks to all of you who have supported us and continue to support us with your business. Your trust and confidence in us is something we don't take lightly and we look forward to working with you for years to come. Enjoy your New Year's celebrations and we'll see you right back here in 2010.

Last night, representatives from Element Fusion attended the Greater Oklahoma City Chamber of Commerce's METRO 50 awards dinner. This is Element Fusion's fourth consecutive year to be listed on the METRO 50, a listing of the 50 fastest-growing, privately-held companies in the Oklahoma City metro area.

There's always suspense as the METRO 50 doesn't release their specific rankings until the company names are called out in decending order. Element Fusion was called at #33, at which point the crowd erupted into a 15 minute long standing ovation ... or, maybe that just happened in my head.

Anyway, we're not only excited to be a part of this great group of businesses, but we're also excited that so many of our clients made the list as well. Past or present clients of ours that showed up at the METRO 50 this year include: CoreVault, Enviro Clean, HSEarchitects, Paycom Payroll Services, RFIP, Inc., ShapardResearch, LLC., Sooner Network Solutions, Inc., Chaparral Energy, and H&H Gun Range and Shooting Sports Outlet.

Congratulations to these great companies and to all the METRO 50 winners. In case you're interested. I've included a few photos from last night's event below.

Owners Ryan Whitaker and Justin Cowan offer up the EF gang sign just after accepting their award on stage.

Vivian Hoang and Justin Boeckman, our Internet Marketing specialists, play with their iPhones when they should be paying attention.

When you're selling web-based products to customers around the world, you realize there are lots of people out there who don't yet recognize Oklahoma City as a hotbed of online innovation. We've encountered many customers who are surprised to learn where we make our company's home.

But from our perspective, Oklahoma City is a great place to be. And an article from Mike Koehler in the Oklahoman today gives some credence to what we've always believed to be true. Check out "Online innovation going strong in state" for a taste of all that's happening here. Kudos to all of our innovative Oklahoma City brethren and to Koehler for drawing attention to what's happening in our little neck of the woods.

This week, Inc. Magazine announced it's 2009 Inc. 5000, a listing of the 5,000 fastest-growing private companies in America. We're happy to report that Element Fusion has been named to this listing for our second straight year.

Our growth of 131% from 2005 to 2008 puts us at #2,341 nationally, and at #21 out of the 45 Oklahoma-based companies on the list.

As always, we want to thank you, our customers and supporters, for your continued business. It goes without saying, but we'll say it anyway -- without you, there would be no Element Fusion. So, thank you for everything and we look forward to many more years of continued growth together.

We've got some icy weather going on here in Oklahoma City today. Much of the city is shut down due to road conditions. Fortunately, at Element Fusion, when bad weather strikes, things keep moving right along. And good thing, too, since we know that many of you live in various places around the world where it is probably sunny and really pleasant right now. Lucky you! Rest assured, our team is still here if you need us, though we are likely huddled as close to a fireplace or space heater as possible.

Our team is working remotely today so that nobody has to drive on the ice. However, since our operations are almost entirely web-based, business carries on pretty much as normal. If you need us, you can contact us by email (support@publishpath.com), through the project portal, and through any other electronic channel as normal. If you do call us on the phone, you'll have to leave a voice mail message, which we will check regularly, but for faster service today, electronic communication is the best. Thank you for your understanding.

Also, rest assured that our hosting facilities are well-tested and ready to endure any storm. All of our online products as well as all websites hosted with us are housed in our Tier IV datacenter facility in Dallas which maintains multiple redundancies on all critical systems just in case things get bad.

We hope that you're staying warmer than we are today. Let us know if you need anything.