With the launch of our new LightCMS content management system website, we are also launching a new LightCMS blog. Up to this point, we've posted everything related to LightCMS alongside our other content here on the Element Fusion blog. Now, we'll be splitting things up and posting LightCMS-related content separately on the LightCMS blog.

Be sure to subscribe to the LightCMS blog by RSS or by email so that you won't miss out on any updates. Again, if it's exclusively about LightCMS, it won't be showing up here on the Element Fusion blog anymore, so you'll want to be tuned into the new blog starting now. Of course, the Element Fusion blog will still be around bringing lots of great content about our other products, our company, and our services, so you'll want to keep an eye on it as well. Oh, and naturally, you'll also want to follow our Twitter feeds for Element Fusion and LightCMS.

Thanks again and we look forward to bringing you even more great content through both of our blogs in the years to come.

This is part four in our series on "Getting results from your website." Other articles in the series include: "part one: the website hub," "part two: the impact of design," and "part three: the need for do-it-yourself content tools." In this article, we're going to discuss the power of blogging on your website.

A blog by any other name ...

When we talk to small businesses, we often find they're not too interested in "blogging." But, if we ask them about posting articles or news stories on their site, they are generally very interested in that. The truth is that blogging is nothing more than consistently posting articles on your site. Perhaps the term "blogging" has acquired some connotations that aren't appealing to small businesses. Nonetheless, blogging, or whatever you want to call it, is something that all businesses should consider.

Impressive benefits

Blogging can help you get results from your company website by doing the following:

1. Establishing you and your business as an authority in your areas of expertise.
2. Encouraging your site visitors to return often because of your regularly updated content.
3. Building a dedicated readership for your content through RSS syndication.
4. Making search engines pay attention to your regularly updated, keyword-rich content.
5. Giving you a more personal voice through which to speak to your clients and customers.
6. Encouraging your customers to talk back and interact with your website by leaving comments.

These are just a few of the key benefits of blogging on your company site. So, what does it take to make it work?

Slow and steady wins the race

Content is key. If you want to be successful blogging, you have to commit to generating new content regularly. My recommendation is that you post one new article per week to start. Even if you think you can post more, hold yourself back to one per week and see how it goes. You'll discover that it's harder than you think to generate new content every single week, but if you can do it, it well worth the time invested. A consistent, steady stream of quality content is all it takes to be successful blogging.

What should I write about?

You can post anything you want to share with the world. Here are a few ideas:

1. News about your company
2. Official company announcements
3. "Get to know you" articles about employees
4. Opinions on events or happenings in your industry
5. Commentary on articles that others have written
6. "How to" articles to help your clients and customers
7. Posts featuring pictures of your company activities or employees
8. Posts soliciting feedback from your customers, encouraging them to speak back to you in the comments.
9. Information about giveaway and other special promotions

How do I get started?

As we discussed in part 3 of our series, you need do-it-yourself content tools in order to blog successfully. Your website needs to be running on a platform that has blogging built right in. With a weekly flow of new content, you need the ability to post articles yourself. If your site is already running on one of Element Fusion's content management systems, you're all set. If not, or if you need help getting started, just let us know and we'll be happy to talk with you more.

We recently launched the new blog tagging feature on our CMS system. We've put together a little tutorial video about using this feature to show you a bit about how it works. By the way, for you resellers out there, this video is unbranded and can be used on your own site if you wish to embed it. You can find it and other tutorials on our unbranded CMS Tutorials show at Blip.tv, or by clicking on the image below.

We've got a major release of new features scheduled for tomorrow on our LightCMS, SkyCMS and WaterCMS products, so we wanted to give you the heads up. These are some major enhancements and some items that many of you have asked for so we know you're going to really love this release. We'll follow up in a couple of days with more details.

Blog tagging or categories

Some call 'em tags, some call 'em categories. We're calling 'em tags but they also work just like categories. You'll be able to assign any number of tags to any blog post. It's easy. Then, once you've added tags to your posts, you can create lists of all of your tags where users can click a tag to view all posts with that tag. And, for the super fancy blogger out there, we've even created a built-in "tag cloud" view as well. Of course, for the designers, the tag lists are marked-up as lists so you can style them however you want.

Photo gallery slideshows

The photo gallery gets a huge upgrade with the slideshow skin. This lets you display the images in your photo gallery one at a time, transitioning  from one image to the next. You can control several settings including whether you want the system to resize your images and to what size, how you want the slideshow to transition (fading, scrolling, or no transition), plus length of transition and duration of each slide hold. This hugely requested item is super easy to set up, giving you the power to make a real visual splash on your site.

Improved photo gallery captions

Also on the photo gallery, you will now have the ability to add longer photo names and rich text captions, including links. The new image information can be edited via our familiar WYSIWYG editor allowing you to set up detailed image information.

Launch and downtime

This exciting release is scheduled to launch tomorrow morning, Thursday, November 13th, 2008 at 7am Central Standard Time (GMT -6). There will be a minimal period of downtime (less than 15 minutes) as the changes are rolled out. We will follow up with more information including links to new support articles on using these features soon after release.