We are happy to announce a brand new website for a fantastic group of people who are educating and empowering children and families in El Salvador.

Their original site was a blogspot blog, so we moved them over to a Joomla site, with many bells and whistles, and then attached a WordPress site for their Speak Blog project.

It was a joy to work with a very committed team bot while they were in El Salvador and in the United States.

Please visit the new Programa Velasco site, send us your comments and critiques, and be sure to support the work that they are doing!

Upload pictures from your computer to the gallery.
1. Go to the gallery you created in MorfeoShow (located at components>Morfeoshow>Galleries).
2. Select the upload button next to your Gallery
3. Click the choose image button and select the image you want to upload
4. Add your title and description
5. Save image

Add your gallery into an article
1. In your gallery list you will see a plugin Id. for GICC it is {morfeo 3}
2. Copy the plugin id and past it into the article where you want it to show up. In this case paste it at the bottom of the childcare page and ceneter it.

Configure the slideshow
1. Go to Components>MorfeoShow>Galleries
2. Click on the gallery title you would like to configure.
3. Pick your gallery format. This is the type of gallery you would like to display, you can experiment with these to determine what you like.
4. adjust the gallery settings on the right hand side that match the gallery format you chose. This will help you to display the gallery at the right size, color background, flash settings, etc.

That should get you on your way.

Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance (OREPA) is a 501c3 non-profit organization working tirelessly to raise awareness and work to stop the production of nuclear weapons at the Y-12 facility in Oak Ridge Tennessee. We wholeheartedly support this work at Lowthian Design Works and hope that this new website will contribute to all the organizing work they are doing.

From the new website:

The Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance is a collection of eternally hopeful souls who believe we have the power to create the world we hope to live in. Even though most of them are old enough to know better, they’ve been insisting that nonviolent actions—speaking at public hearings; grassroots organizing; public workshops; civil resistance actions; letters to the editor—can lead to a world free of nuclear weapons.

We ask you to please give them your support!

Details:

We utilized a theme Designed and developed by THE MOLITOR

Some Extensions used:

Fast Secure Contact Form By Mike Challis

OptionTree By Derek Herman

The Events Calendar By Shane & Peter, Inc.

TinyMCE Advanced By Andrew Ozz

WP-PageNavi By Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan & scribu | Visit plugin site

WP Render Blogroll Links By Tanin Ehrami

Thanks to all developers that have contributed their time and efforts. Please consider supporting them in return for their excellent work.

Well, those days are over and we would love to offer you some pizazz to your website.

We do have to be careful about one thing, and that is licensing. Not all fonts have been released to be used freely on websites.

There is a great site that offers a great selection of fonts to look at and we encourage you to take a look to see if there is something there that you like.

http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/list/mostdownloaded

Take a look and contact us if you would like to change your overall font, some of your items such as headings or navigation and we will go to work. If there are other fonts that are not there, we can look into the licensing for you.

Contact us if you have any questions.

We’re trying out Aller Regular on this blog now, but who knows, we may change it for another tomorrow.

So tell us: what are your resolutions for the coming year, and how can we help?

Do you feel your website is out of date? Are you ready for a design change? Or have you been working to change your site but haven’t found the time to complete the transformation? If you have been procrastinating, what situations or problems are holding you back? We may find together that something you thought was difficult is actually quite easy. If you are not keeping up with the web work that you do know how to do, have you considered asking us to do some of it for you until you have more time? We want your website to look great and be useful as much as you do, so don’t be afraid to ask if you are feeling overwhelmed.

We are also always researching new ways of doing things and new software, so if you are ready to try a new web feature or upgrade something that is not working as well as it could, let us know and we can try something new this year.

Don’t forget that we can fulfill other tech needs. Last year we launched AskUsForHelp.org to answer your tech questions. If you are having trouble with your computers or are looking for advice about upgrading, head on over and create an account. We can’t help if you don’t ask.

Happy New Year, and may the web bring us all a little closer together this year!

Try not to use too many selling words. Some are ok, but if your email has too many “free offer” “great deal” “save now” and even “click here.” One or two are ok, but if the ratio of text to these types of messages gets too high, the spam filter rates your email too high and blam, you’re out. Never, even in jest include a word like ‘viagra’ and avoid the word ‘pharmacy,’ or other words you see in common spam.

Also avoid using things like colored text, ALL CAPS (especially in subject line), and never use invisible text (same color as background). The spam filters are on the lookout for anything like this, besides you may want to think about how this looks to the public. If your email look professional your odds are better that the spam filter will let you pass.

One way around any of the rules above is to use graphics. You can use colored text and as many of the dangerous words and phrases as you like in a graphic as spam filters can only see words. this being said, spam filters do look for too many pictures. A high ratio of graphics to text will alert the filters.

Let’s talk about links. Too many links is bad, especially to sites outside of your own domain. If you need to include a lot of links, you might want to consider hosting a page on your website with the links and then a single link to that page. If you are using a sending service that converts your links for tracking, Thunderbird, and to a lesser degree Outlook has started hitting links written out in text with a spam flag. This is not quite as bad as getting knocked out, but if a person’s spam filtering is set high on their email reader, they may not see it, and it is not nice to have your message flagged as ‘spam.’ This means rather than having a link: http://lowthian.org make your text links to the page such as visit our blog.

Beware of sloppy code. If there is a lot of unnecessary coding in your html, you are a big target for the spam filter. Use as little code as possible, and never past code directly from other programs such as Microsoft Word. The leaner the better with your code!

Use a reputable email service. Outside services work hard to make sure that their addresses are not blocked by spam filters. This is something you do not get if you try to send it out from your own domain or email program. Our clients have been using Campaign Monitor and we have been very pleased with the results.

Whether or not you use your own domain, be sure to register your domains for E-mail authentication. This is an important way to tell the spam filters that you are legitimate (don’t worry if you are a client, we handle this for you).

These are just a few tips, be sure to follow some sort of plan to not only check your current email, but recheck it periodically to make sure that you haven’t inadvertently made yourself a target.

For more information, feel free to contact us, and if you are a justice based organization, we might be able to help you set up or improve your current email updates and newsletters.

Email links can be unpredictable. If someone is not surfing on their own computer and they find your website, when they click on an email link, it will open up whatever email program is on that machine. This will cause confusion, and they may try to send an email and find it never actually goes, as the email is not set up correctly. Even if the email is set up, it will be sent from whoever owns the computer, so the owner, not the actual sender, will receive the reply. Even if they’re using their own computer, they may use web based mail and therefore not have their own email program set up.

The other, perhaps more important reason is to prevent email harvesting. Bots are constantly crawling through pages on the internet looking for legitimate email addresses. By adding yours to your website, you are handing it over to thousands of spammers, who may use it for advertising or, worse, for spreading malware (viruses, spyware, etc.).

So, to make life easier and to keep your address safe from malicious uses, we encourage you to use a form to send email. Make sure it is a form that does not put your email address into the html code (view source to check). If you would like help with this, please contact us… using, of course, the form on our website.

We have had a very busy summer with some new projects. One of them is about to launch and we wanted to share it with you.

Café Campesino, a long time client, has been growing in a nice organic way by merging Sweetwater Organic Coffee Roastery down in Gainesville Florida, and partnering with some great folks in Atlanta to open a coffeehouse. Café Campesino sends out a monthly e-newsletter with all these and other updates including a lot of news about their travels to coffee growing countries to meet with farmers and cooperatives. They usually have a ton to share, so why limit it to those who subscribe to their newsletter?

We invite you to check out their brand new shiny blog, fairtradewire.com! Using WordPress as a platform, this was Lowthian Design’s first really challenging WordPress project. With new features to design and implementation twists and turns being thrown at us every week, we had a ton of fun customizing templates, experimenting with great plugins and finding ways to make WordPress even easier to use.

We have a couple more WordPress projects on their way, so stay tuned..

WordPress is somewhat limited in the media file types that it handles by default. To see if your favorite type is handled, check here. If it’s not, you may want to…

Expand your MIME types

MIME stands for Multipurpose Internet Mail Extension. It’s a communications protocol that allows for transmission of different forms of data such as audio, binary and video—it no longer refers strictly to email data transfer.

To expand the types of video (or other media) you can upload and stream, first install the PJW Mime Config plugin.  Once the MIME plugin is installed, you can add any of the file extensions that  you would like to upload to your WordPress blog.  The first one I added was .3gp, the type of video used by many mobile devices today.  In the plugin, I added .3gp as the file extension and video/3gpp as the associated MIME type.  Now WordPress will happily accept my .3gp video uploads.

Here is an extensive list of Mime types you may like to add http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com/mime-types.shtml

Upload and play your video: All-in-One Video Pack

Once you’ve made sure that your media file type will work in WordPress, you’ll need a player to play the video within the posts.  The player plugin I chose is the All-in-One Video Pack by Kaltura.  Once installed and activated, the plugin is ready to go, no additional configuration needed.  You will need to sign up for an account with Kaltura and this will be handled directly in your WP control panel. This plugin also comes with a sidebar widget that will show your latest videos if you would like to do so.

I chose All-In-One Video Pack for videos, but it will handle many other types of media as well. For instance, you can film directly from your webcam or insert photos or audio from your computer.  It also will pull photos from Flikr or NYPL; for audio, you can pull from Jamendo, CCMixter or your own collection.  For video you have the choices or Metacafe or PhotoBucket, along with your home collection.

The one down side I had with All-in-One Video Pack was browser crashes.  The upload process would sometimes stall and the browser would crash.  This only happened to me in Chrome and has not happened in a while.  Still, if using this plugin, I would save any text as draft before adding media to it… just in case.  All in all, All-in-One seems to be a decent solution to streaming video.

Once you’ve installed All-in-One, you will have a new option under Upload/Insert when you are editing your post.  You will see a red button called Add interactive video.  To add a video, simply click the button, choose upload, browse for the folder you would like to add in your post, and click upload.  That’s it—you now have your video playing in your blog post.