IQ block country is available from the WordPress plug-in repository here.

As you can see from the screenshot, this plug-in is very simple to use.

1. Press the button to download a copy of the database to your website
2. Choose the countries you want to block

Now, this is going to block all traffic from every country. Spammers and hackers are a lot smarter than that. But, this is going to go a long way toward reducing the number of hackers that can find your website.

The post Cool Plugin: IQ Block Country appeared first on C3 Design.

As some of you know, on Thursday our hosting server was attacked. This was part of a global coordinated effort to brute force attack WordPress sites. It kept us busy throughout the day and into the evening Thursday, but we were able to get everything under control for now. Some have asked if this was preventable, and what should be done to assure this doesn’t happen again.

Best thing we can do is simply to be prepared. I’m sure this will not be the last time this happens. We are in the process of making a specific plan for our WordPress sites, including updating software, adding caching plug-ins, and adding extra security to the sites. These items will be rolled out in stages over the next few months.

In the meantime, here are a couple of articles that discuss the attack in depth, and what can be done in general to help prepare for the next one.

Massive botnet using brute force attack to target WordPress sites | The Verge

WordPress Brute Force Attacks, and What You Need to Do About it

The post WordPress Is Under Attack appeared first on C3 Design.

By: Book Glutton

While creating custom fields for a website this morning, I ran across a problem – short codes would not execute in the custom field. I came up with a solution that involves some complicated coding. I wasn’t really happy with this, as my client would have to remember a lot of code to use these custom fields on their website.

But, it turns out if you add the following code to your template file:

<php echo apply_filters('the_content', get_post_meta($post->ID,'CUSTOM_FIELD_NAME',true)); ?>

It will execute all short codes in the custom fields.

The post Executing Shortcodes in Custom Fields appeared first on C3 Design.

From his website:

We know that everyone does not have the same needs, but we recognize that everyone needs some advice to help them find the best options for them. RF Insurance Masters listens to their clients to understand the specific needs and makes some recommendations to help find their solution.

Ray serves as the Chairman for the Four Points Chamber of Commerce and was a founding member of this chamber that was launched in March of 2010.  Throughout 2010 the chamber has grown to be 110 members strong in the first 9 months since formation.  The Four Points Chamber will open a visitor center in 2013 along with an Four Points area map with 125 members.   He has over 23 years of experience in high tech program management and team leadership.  Ray has envisioned a group of strong community minded businesses that enjoy collaborative networking to promote local business growth and giving back to the community.  Ray is a member of Referrals at Twin Creeks BNI chapter and serves on the membership committee for the chapter.

The post Client Spotlight: RF Insurance Masters appeared first on C3 Design.

According to the developer of If Menu:

Simple plugin that adds extra functionality to Menu Items. The plugin will allow to show or hide menu items based on condition statements (Is single page, User is Logged In, etc).

The management is very easy, each menu item will have a “Enable Conditional Logic” check, that will allow to select a conditional statement (Example in Screenshots)

Basic conditional statements are included in the plugin, other will be included in future releases or can be added nu another plugin or theme.

The plug-in was originally intended to show specific menu items based on whether someone was logged in, logged out, or on a specific page or post. But, using the plugin’s sample code, I was able to easily create a custom menu choice that would only show specific menu items on specific menu pages.

I then went through each menu item and selected “show” on the pages that I wanted to show Menu A and “hide” on the pages that I wanted to show Menu B. It took a bit of time going through 50 pages and changing the menu options on each one, but when it was done, it worked exactly as I wanted it to.

You can view the plug-in and download it here.

The post Create Different Menus with the Plugin “If Menu” appeared first on C3 Design.

Over the last couple weeks, I’ve been charged with creating a system of managing multiple WordPress installations at once. I think this is going to give me the perfect excuse to start learning a variation of WordPress called WordPress Multisite.

WordPress multi site has been on my list of things to learn for the last year, but I haven’t had much of a reason to use it. Now, I’ve been asked to learn it for a couple of specific projects.

Where I’m Starting with WordPress Multisite

WPMU.org is one of my favorite WordPress websites, so I decided to start with their list of articles. I found a great article called WordPress Multisite Guide for Beginners: Unlock the Power of Networks – WPMU.org. I’m going to start there, and work my way out.

Here’s what I go at this point: WordPress Multisite allows you to manage multiple WordPress blogs that are controlled by one master account. They explain in the article this is perfect for school districts that wish to have individually managed websites for each school, but keep them altogether on one server and under one support umbrella. This is also perfect for sports leagues that wish to have separately managed team pages. This idea intrigues me, and I wanted to use it to start a scouting blog network. But alas, other things got in the way. I would also like to use this to offer low-cost websites to very small and start-up businesses.

Since I don’t have a lot of experience with WordPress multi site yet, I’m hoping to use this to find out the advantages and disadvantages of using it with my particular methods of creating WordPress websites.

If you have any recommended resources for WordPress multi site, please let me know in the comments area of this post.

The post WordPress Multisite and Managing Multiple Websites appeared first on C3 Design.

This website can help you quickly find themes you might be interested in for your website.

You can find their website at http://www.themescroller.com

The post A Quick Way to Review WordPress Themes – ThemeScroller.com appeared first on C3 Design.

There are a lot of websites that have themes available for the audience side of your website, but it’s almost impossible to find something for the administrator part of the site. After a while, you start to get bored looking at the same administrator interface on every WordPress website.

Now, I’m sure for most of you only have to look at one website interface – yours. But, I believe the bolder colors and simplified design will be a welcome change from the existing interface. Follow the link below to read all the details about it.

Preview The Secret New WordPress Admin Design – WPMU.org.

The post Preview The Secret New WordPress Admin Design – WPMU.org appeared first on C3 Design.

By: Martin Maciaszek

So you’ve finished your new WordPress website. Congratulations! But, this is not the end of your work with WordPress. On top of your regular content updates (you are updating your content, right?), you will also need to maintain the software that runs your website. Keeping your website software updated is a good first step toward a secure and well-maintained online presence. There are three primary areas you might need to update on your website. These include:

• WordPress Core Software
• Plug-ins
• Theme(s)

WordPress Core

There is a new WordPress update every 4-6 weeks. Most of these updates are security updates and bug fixes. Every now and again, they will include feature updates, such as 3.5′s media library update. But, for the most part, these updates are to help keep the software secure, and your website secure.

Plug-ins

A lot of plug-in updates will happen around the same time as updates to WordPress itself. Just like the updates to WordPress’ core software, these updates can add new features and fix existing bugs. Also, as WordPress gets updated, plug-ins must be updated to allow for and access any new programming built into WordPress.

Themes

Theme updates are traditionally less frequent than WordPress’ core and plug-in updates, but they are just as important. Primary reasons for updating themes include security and bug fixes.

How do you update your site?

When you log in to your administration control panel, you will notice a number with a double circle arrow next to it. These are the updates to your website. If you click on this button, you will see a list of the WordPress core, plug-in, and theme updates for your site.

To run these updates, click the check box next to them, and click “update.” I prefer to run my updates in groups. I run my WordPress core updates separately, then any plug-in updates in groups of five. Finally, I run my theme updates. After each group of updates, I will go spot check 3 to 5 pages on my website to make sure they still look correct. This way, if I see any issues I know the problem was with the last update that I ran.

But, before I run any updates, I backup my website. Now, I’m a little paranoid, so I backup my website using XCloner, then download that backup to my local hard drive. Once I have that backup, then I know if anything goes wrong during my updates, I can restore my website without too much hassle.

I check for updates once a week on my websites; once a month should suffice for the average website. But, since I’m usually writing articles more than once a week on my sites, I take a quick peek to see if there are any updates to run before I begin writing.

When you shouldn’t upgrade

There are times when it is not as easy as a couple of clicks to update your website. Unfortunately, you will probably find this out by breaking your site during an update. There are many reasons a particular update with cause a problem on your site. One reason is new bugs or errors in the software. Just like any piece of software, your website is prone to errors. With these kind of errors, the best you can do is roll back to an earlier version of the plug-in, theme, etc., and report to the developer the error that you had. Sometimes they will be able to help you figure out what went wrong and fix it.

The second reason you would not want to run an update is customization done by your developer. Good developers can write code to make your WordPress site do things that it wasn’t meant to do “out-of-the-box.” Great developers can write code that can also do that, as well as survive updates to the plug-in and theme software itself. Unfortunately, the only person that might know if there were any modifications to a plug-in’s function is your developer. Usually asking your developer, “is it safe for me to update my WordPress software?” will help you get the answer you need. Some developers (myself included) might offer to update the software for you and future-proof any customizations for a small fee.

So, make sure your site stays healthy by keeping your software updated.

The post Show Some Update Love to Your WordPress Website appeared first on C3 Design.

From their website:

Dental Genius Assisting School was founded by Dr. Thad H. Gillespie in 2007. Dental Genius provides a high quality education to people while allowing them to continue working at another job with an affordable and competitive tuition. The Dental Genius team knows that people are capable of learning dental skills quickly if the learning process incorporates hands on training and mentorship. We also highly emphasize the importance of interpersonal skills and communication skills. We offer comprehensive guidance in interviewing and resume development. We believe it is important to offer continuing education opportunities to our alumni to further develop their skills.

The post Client Spotlight: Dental Genius Assisting School appeared first on C3 Design.

The text widget inside WordPress is one of the most versatile widgets available. The ability to put HTML or plain text into it allows for a variety of uses. Unfortunately, that requires you to have a working knowledge of HTML to add code to it. For the longest time, it was suggested that those who could not write HTML code quickly could go in and create a new post or page draft, type in their content there, and then switch from the visual editor to the HTML editor, copy the code, and paste it into a text widget.

With the BlackStudio TinyMCE Widget, it will add the visual editor directly into a new widget for you. This allows for easy use of HTML formatting, including inserting images and other media. You can still switch to the text mode which will allow you to enter raw HTML code directly.

This can also replace other basic widgets, including using shortcodes, and image & video insertion.

You can download it from the plug-in repository on WordPress.org at the following address: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/black-studio-tinymce-widget/

If you’re interested in seeing a list of other plug-ins that I like, you can find them over on WordPress.org under “My Favorite Plugins” on my profile.

The post Plugins I Like: BlackStudio TinyMCE Widget appeared first on C3 Design.

When I talk to other WordPress developers, it seems we always end up asking about our favorite plug-ins. Now with this one item in WordPress, you can share your favorite plug-ins with others. To mark items as your favorites, you create a WordPress.org account, which is easily be done on the WordPress.org website. Once you create an account, login and search for plug-ins, you will see a button below the download button that says “favorite.” When you click on this, it marks that plug-in as a favorite of yours.

You can then give that list of favorited plugins to WordPress users via your username. Once someone has your username, they can go to the Plug-ins > Add New section and click on the Favorites link. Once there, they can type in your WordPress.org username and see a list of your favorite plug-ins.

If you are someone developing websites for others on a regular basis, this is a great way to get a list of plug-ins into a particular WordPress installation quickly. For those that are not developers, this is a good way to find new plug-ins from people you trust. I’ve started using this with clients who are eager to learn WordPress, but might not know where to start in looking for plug-ins.

The post My Favorite Thing in WordPress 3.5 appeared first on C3 Design.

By: Odd.note

So hello, again. Boy, have I been busy! Frankly, it would take me too long to explain everything that’s been going on over the last few months, and most of you would be bored to tears by it anyway.

The important thing is that business has been going well, I’ve learned a whole new bag of WordPress tricks that I want to bring to you, and things have never been better. But, this post is really meant to be more of a reset point, than anything informational.

However, I would love to give you one new interesting piece of efficiency that I’m using on my own website that you might be able to use on yours. Right now, I am dictating this entire post on my phone. Yes, I have an iPhone, and yes, I’m using Siri. But, there are good free dictation application out there for various platforms (I’ll get into those another time), and you can use those to create quick posts, tweets, and other items when you have a few minutes of downtime.

The biggest question I’m always asked is “how do I rank higher in search engines?” The simple answer is create more content. Although it is more complicated than that, good quality, consistent content on your website will be the cornerstone of getting ranked higher on search engines. Just like a lot of you, I don’t have the time (or am unwilling to make the time) to write new content for my website. I am finding that I can write short, but still thoughtful, items for my website while doing laundry, dishes, or simply going for a quick walk. Yes, I might look a little strange talking to myself while walking the neighborhood, but I am still able to get content written. Food for thought…

Anyway, back to the point of this post: to reintroduce myself. I’m going to start working on getting to a regular schedule of posting again. I’m going to be including information about interesting WordPress plug-ins I’ve found, search engine optimization, and whatever interesting articles I find.

The post So, hello again. appeared first on C3 Design.

Right now, I wanted to do a quick summary of the plugins I discussed during my part of the session.

• All In One Event Calendar – A calendar system with month, week, day, agenda views; upcoming events widget, color-coded categories, recurrence, and import/export of .ics feeds.
• Antispam Bee – Anonymous and independent antispam solution. Detect comment and trackback spam. Includes statistics and notifications.
• Editorial Calendar -The Editorial Calendar makes it possible to see all your posts and drag and drop them to manage your blog.
• Google Analytics For WordPress – Track your WordPress site easily and with lots of metadata: views per author & category, automatic tracking of outbound clicks and pageviews.
• Nextgen Gallery -NextGEN Gallery is a fully integrated image gallery plugin for WordPress with dozens of options and features.
• Share This – The ShareThis plugin is a quick and easy sharing service that allows your users to share your content to 120 social channels. Also features ShareNow.
• Simple Press – A forum plugin that integrates seamlessly into your WordPress website.
• Social Media Widget – Adds links to all of your social media and sharing site profiles. Tons of icons come in 3 sizes, 4 icon styles, and 4 animations.
• Ultimate Coming Soon Page – Creates a Coming Soon page or Launch page for your Website while it’s under construction and collects emails from your visitors.
• Woocommerce – An e-commerce toolkit that helps you sell anything.
• WordPress SEO – Improve your WordPress SEO: Write better content and have a fully optimized WordPress site.
• XCloner -A full backup and restore plugin for WordPress, it will backup and restore both files and database.

The post Cospace / Four Points Chamber Lunch and Learn appeared first on C3 Design.

I’ve hated it so long I can barely remember why I started not liking it. I think it comes down to the fact that back before it could export PDFs, there was no way to get your content to another format and have it resemble your original vision. Since then, Microsoft has added the export to PDF functionality, which has made my life (and the lives of those who used to send me Publisher files) easier. At least I can take a PDF and do some manipulation to it. But, what if you don’t have Publisher and can’t convert your files to PDF?

Enter Zamzar

Zamzar offers free online file conversion of various file types, including Microsoft Publisher. I have been using this site for a few years now and it has been very helpful during those times when I have to get a file converted out of Publisher.

Right from their home page, you can upload your file, choose the format you want to output in, and they will email you a download link when it is finished processing. It’s incredibly easy!

How are the results? For the most part, they do what I need, which is usually just getting the basic graphics and text out of the file. But, see for yourself:

On the left, the flyer has been converted from Publisher to Word. On the right, a PDF created from Publisher directly.

As you can see, it’s not a perfect process. Most of the issues stem from missing fonts on my system that the Publisher file uses. But, I can edit the document and I don’t have to type the entire form over!

If you can get a PDF from the original Publisher file, that is your best bet. But, if you can’t for some reason, look into Zamzar for your quick conversion.

The post Microsoft Publisher appeared first on C3 Design.

We started with the existing content and built out a basic website. Once we had that, Marilyn and the other Open staffers were able to get us photos, marquees and new text to create a site that really showcased the event. This year we have added a few small features to the site, including a new basic mobile version of the website.

The Llano Crawfish Open is the Texas Hill Country event you don’t want to miss.  There’s great food, live music, a golf tournament and much more. It is April 20-21 in Llano. You can check out their website at llanocrawfishopen.com.

Go join them this weekend for a lot of fun, good music and great food!

The post Client Spotlight – Llano Crawfish Open appeared first on C3 Design.

The Arc promotes and protects the human rights of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

Over the last 60 years, The Arc has grown and adapted to the changes that people with disabilities face across their life span. Through the decades, The Arc has seen several name changes, advocated for the passage of state and federal legislation on behalf of people with disabilities and established a broad network of  state and local chapters that range from small voluntary groups to large, professional organizations.

The post Charity Spotlight: The Arc appeared first on C3 Design.

This is a short “case study” on one person who knew the value of getting something online quickly & cleanly and how fast you can have a C3 Standard website up and running:

On Monday, April 9, I received an email from a business colleague and friend, Marilyn McCray, letting me know that a colleague of hers, Karen Millican, might be interested in a simple and easy to manage website.

I emailed Karen to let her know I would be interested in helping her out. We scheduled a meeting for Wednesday, April 11. We talked through what she was looking for and the C3 Standard package sounded like a good fit. All she would have to supply is a Word document with her text and any photos/logos for the site. She already had most of it done, so that evening she sent everything she had to me. Her site went live Thursday, April 12.

We went from complete strangers to a full website in less than 4 days. Sure, the site needs some tweaks (which we will be doing today), but instead of a dead link when someone types in her domain name, she has a nice, simple website that will be easy to update and edit. More importantly – it is online now, not a month from now.

You can see her site at http://www.karenmillican.com

The post New Website Launch: Karen Millican appeared first on C3 Design.

The first question is should you have digital business cards. Although this article is a little over a year old, I believe it explains why digital cards are a good idea quite succinctly. It lists the 6 reasons why you should replace your cards, which include my two favorites:

• Never run out of cards. Ever left your business cards at home or back at the hotel room? Started to hand out cards but didn’t have enough? Had to put a line through inaccurate information and handwrite in the new? Look through your pockets for a prospects card only to discover you lost it? Having an online card solves these problems.
• Remembering the place. The online version of your business card can tell you the location from where the card was received.

If this is something that interests you, you’ll need some sort of application to create and distribute your digital business cards. Cardcloud is easy to use and available for the iPhone and Android platforms. You can create different business cards with different contact information for just about any situation. Here’s how I use Cardcloud:

• Personal - For any friends, parents of my kids’ friends, church members, or just about anything where I need someone to have my personal phone, e-mail address, twitter and Facebook accounts.
• Business - For all current and potential clients, vendors, etc. This one includes my business e-mail, phone, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn accounts.
• Scouting -This one includes my Scouting title, personal phone number, Scouting and e-mail address.

Now, when I’m out in the world and I run across someone I want to give my card to, I open up the iPhone Cardcloud application, tap the card I want to use and tap “Send”. I can then either have the recipient type in their e-mail address, or I can type it in for them. My business card, plus an attached v-card, are sent to the recipient. Cardcloud keeps a record of the e-mail address I sent the card to and a location where the card was given. It’s great and I automatically get a record of the recipient’s e-mail address to use later. And it’s all free.

I still keep paper business cards on me in most business situations, but having 3 different business cards on me at any given time makes sure I am ready for any situation, business or personal, to make sure I never miss a contact opportunity.

The post Electronic Business Cards appeared first on C3 Design.

Cornerstone Builders Supply Custom Cabinetry would relish the opportunity to assist you in personalizing your home office, media room, study, library, powder room or any other living space. Our extraordinary design flexibility and endless variety allow you to put your own unique touch on each and every room.

Chad and the rest of the team at Cornerstone Builder Supply were great to work with. They came to us with a simple, but often repeated problem: they liked the design of their website, but it was incredibly difficult to keep updated. We kept their existing design, adapted it to fit WordPress, and added photo galleries not only showing their finished work, but also the wide selection of cabinet and door styles they have available.

Although their site is a work in progress (yes, there are a few pages that still need content from them), we are happy with how it turned out and hope Cornerstone Builder Supply’s online presence continues to grow.

You can see their website at http://www.cbsupply.net

The post Client Spotlight: Cornerstone Builder Supply appeared first on C3 Design.