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.

I’m sure you have become used to seeing all the advertising that pops up while you are watching a YouTube video, even if it is a video embedded in another website.

If you own the rights to that video, you can turn off the advertising in your YouTube (Google) account settings.

Go to YouTube, and log in. Under your name you will find a ‘Settings’ link. On the left side of this page you will see ‘Manage Account.’ After clicking on that you will see ‘Content displayed along with my uploaded videos,’ expand that and you will see a radio button that says “Do not allow advertisements”

There you have it. While in here you may want to poke about and see if everything else is set up as you like it.

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.

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!

The latest way that most malware has been infecting computers is by jumping in from a webpage. This makes us very vulnerable, especially in an age where we “google it” almost every day. You should assume that any one of the results that you pull up could be a website that has malware lurking ready to jump onto you PC. These pages are also using platforms such as Facebook to distribute links, so a friends’ fun posting might be a trap waiting to infect your computer. Also this time of year be very cautious of greeting cards which may be fun to watch for a few minutes but then cause many hours of stress trying to remove malware from your computer.

Using a browser like Firefox or Chrome and keeping it up to date will help a some as these browsers do a good job alerting you before you visit a malicious site, but they are not perfect, and now malicious code can be hiding in a banner ad on a website that isn’t detected on the primary site.

If you are using a windows machine it has become critical that you keep your system up-to-date. Microsoft has become more efficient at patching security holes and pushing down these updates, so when you see the alert stating that there are security updates available, don’t hesitate, or set them for automatic updates. And though it is a space hog, I recommend you keep Windows System Restore running so that you can back up to an earlier date either if you get attacked, or if the Windows Update does something to break your system or software.

However the downside to Microsoft being more diligent about keeping ahead of attackers is pushing them to look for other ways to attack. This is often done through Adobe products like Flash or PDF Viewer, so it is critical that you keep these up-to-date as well. Be very careful about opening pdf documents, and this will go a little way to protect you, but Flash is a little bit more difficult. You can disable Flash in your browser and not be able to view website flash, but that might limit your web surfing experience some.

So keep your Adobe products up to date by running their updates, and by going to adobe.com to get the latest versions. Once you have installed the latest version, be sure to go to edit, preferences, and then on the left pane go down to ‘Javascript’ and uncheck ‘Enable Acrobat Javascript’ then go to  ’trust manager’ and un-check ‘allow opening of non-PDF file attachments with external applications.’

Of course I’ll say again (at risk of sounding like a broken record) you can avoid all this by installing Linux on your system. Contact us if you would like a consultation about what a transition would look like. When you get time,  read more about why we like Linux.

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.