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!

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.

Your domain information is public knowledge unless you request otherwise. We by default set up our clients domain information cloaked so that they can only send an email and not find your mailing address. However if your address is on your website, or if you have in the past registered without cloaking, you can bet you are in some databases.

The letters often have some sort of urgent plea about your domain expiring, or other way to encourage you to act fast (and not allow enough time to think “this might be a scam”). However one that I recently saw was just very generic, like any other bill you pay every day (see below).

If in doubt about your registration, and whether a letter is legit, please contact us immediately and we will be happy to help you determine who your hosting provider is and whether it is up for renewal.

Oh, and if someone calls and says they service your copier and then asks for your model, hang up on them!

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.

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.

I am back in New Orleans helping with some tech work at the Common Ground Health Clinic. the clinic just celebrated 5 years of service to the Algiers (and greater New Orleans) community. There was a great block party to celebrate the occasion, as well as to welcome the new director of the clinic.

Everything by the most part is running smoothly despite the fact that they do not have a person working on tech at the clinic. So I am upgrading all the computers, setting up a new backup routine (the previous one seems to have fallen apart since I left, again good thing everything has been running smoothly). I will also be setting up a new patient intake room and helping with some tweaks to the patient management software.

I am humbled and honored to again serve a clinic that not only treats patients, but while working there I overhear how patients are encouraged to improve their lifestyle and take steps to understand better what it means to eat right, exercise, stop smoking and other things that will prevent them from being a frequent visitor. In a part of our country where obesity and diabetes are so prevalent, I am happy to see the work being done.

Throw your support behind this clinic in any way you can, and may they be an example for clinics all over the country!

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..

To accomplish this goal, I have started working with a content management system called Zenphoto.

Zen strives to be simple and user friendly. Uploads, gallery management, tagging and categorizing are all very intuitive and could be figured out just by browsing the administrator panel. There are several themes available through Zenphoto’s website, as well as plugins for extending the function of your website.

This project is both a blog and a gallery, so I am using Zenphoto alongside WordPress to make this happen. WordPress has a great plugin that links the two admin control panels together. This way I can get to the back end of Zenphoto from a link in WordPress. It is also possible to fully integrate the two sites on the front end, though this is not the goal of my project.

In my experience, Zenphoto lives up to its philosophy, “Simpler is better.” So if you, like many people, have a large collection of digital images that you would like to make the main theme of your website, I’d recommend considering Zenphoto as your primary or secondary content management system.

This article is to help those using Postie to easily post articles, images and even movies to their WordPress blog.

Postie will only accept emailed items from a pre-approved address, so make sure you are using an address that is setup in the Postie configuration, let us know if you need to add a new address.

When sending an article, put the title of the article in your subject line, it will be converted by Postie into your title. If you are sending via SMS, put your title in hash marks “#your title here#”.

If you want to categorize the article in a single category, put the category followed by a colon (ex  News: Title) If you need to put it in multiple categories use  [Cat XXX]s (ex: ‘[Cat XXX] [Cat YYY] Title of My Article’ ). You can also wait to categorize your article until you are online and can log in to WordPress.

Start your article with “:start” and finish with “:end”, this will strip out any signatures etc. that follow your article, and only what is between these tags will be published.

If you want to add tags, add this at the bottom of the article in this format:
tags : one, two, three (must be in lower case). You can also add tags later when you get to a computer and login to WordPress

To add a comment to a post, use ‘Re:’ in your subject line. For example, if your original post had a subject line “New Post”. If you then send an e-mail with the subject line “Re: New Post”, it will get posted as a comment on the original post.

You can delay posting of the article with the following:

If you are sending a picture, with or without text, use the :start and :end tags and the following:

#img1 caption=’caption for the image’# (the caption is optional)

You can attach more than one photo, just make sure to attach them in the correct order to correspond to your img1, img2 etc.

If the float is set up, the image will allow any text added after the tag to float around the image. If you want the image to float in the body of your text, include the #img1# at the place where you want the text to begin wrapping.

Add video’s one at a time. Send them as and attachement and put any text inside your :start end tags.

As an LDW intern, my days (and some nights) were filled studying Joomla and content management systems, trying my hand at PHP coding and HTML manipulation, and finally putting it all together to construct a web site from the ground up. All the while, I was being guided by two of the most savvy and capable individuals I know, J. and Geoffrey. Each day consisted of a considerable amount of time at the keyboard, and I was thrilled to gain first-hand experience of what it takes to be a web designer. The most memorable moments, however, were the many enlightening discussions I had with J and Geoffrey. While the topic of conversation varied, always present was the sense of teamwork, service, and purpose that drives the shared vision of LDW. While many companies gauge their success in terms of dollars, notoriety, or other internal measures, the members of LDW are motivated first and foremost by the success of their clients. This is because LDW believes in the valuable work that each of its clients are doing and strives to help those individuals and organizations reach higher and further than ever before.

As I head back to complete my degree and pursue my interests in technology innovation, I will continue to lend a helping hand to LDW whenever and however I can. While my internship stint has concluded, I anticipate further collaborations and a continuing partnership. LDW is founded on integrity and forward-thinking, and I am excited to see what the future holds for this great company. I want to thank J. and Geoffrey for sharing their invaluable time, knowledge, and expertise with me. More importantly, thank you for all you are doing to make our world a better place – one web-space at a time.

-Kevin R.

*Click here to find out more about Kevin and his work at Oregon State University.