Creative Spotlight: UnModern Mom

Posted on April 28, 2010
Filed Under Collection of Worx, Creative Spotlight, Graphic Design, In the Spotlight, Logo Design, WordPress Themes | View Comments

Jaime Mann has been a client, a colleague and a friend of mine basically from the moment we met (even though it was virtual!). I’ve done so many different branding exercises with Jaime that we’re at the point where she barely gives me any design direction at all anymore, trusting me to bring her vision to fruition without any input at all. I love working with her because she gives me so much creative leeway and we generally nail a design on the first try now that I’ve worked with her so long and know her likes and dislikes as far as colors, fonts and other design elements go.

I was excited when Jaime contacted me last year to bring her personal “UnModern Mom” blog to life with a logo and WordPress theme design. I’ve also recently set up a Café Press store for Jaime; the UnModern Mom Boutique, where I designed all of the products in there based on Jaime’s ideas.

If you’re a mom or would like to see inside the workings of a successful work at home business, check out the UnModern Mom blog. You’ll find some great recipes for home-cooked meals, ideas for keeping your kids entertained or you can just have a chuckle at her expense!

Check her out:

Freebie Friday: Vector Backgrounds, Patterns, and Florals

Posted on April 23, 2010
Filed Under Freebie Friday, Freebies, Vectors | View Comments

I’ve been tackling complicated/deep issues here at In the Worx for the past couple of weeks so I’m going to lighten up a little and share some fun freebies with you today!

Free Vector Art

Blue Wind vector background

Grunge Vector on Vecteezy

Seamless Pattern from Designious.com

Floral illustration on Vecteezy

Floral mega pack 4 sample from Designious.com

Free Vector waves and bubbles background

And here’s a little bonus freebie for you.

I literally just discovered this really cool tool called Slick Plan. It appears to be a free tool intended for creating sitemaps and flowcharts. Something like this is helpful for me because I am a visual person and I spend a lot of time messing around drawing objects in MS Word when I’m working site maps for my web design clients. Other web-based flowchart creators I’ve come across are very expensive or too clunky to bother with. This one looks promising so I will be signing up and I’ll review it for you sometime in the future when I know if it’s good or not!

Start spreadin’ the news (better)

Posted on April 20, 2010
Filed Under Business Worx, Email Marketing, Marketing, Tips & Tricks | View Comments

Newsletters are one of the most popular marketing tools used to market small businesses today. Whether you’re sending a printed newsletter via snail mail or an electronic newsletter via email, it’s a win-win for everyone. For the subscriber, they benefit from receiving up-to-date information about your business; helpful articles, promotions and giveaways. For your small business, this is your opportunity to stay in touch with your audience. The beauty of the whole thing is, they’ve given you their permission to market to them!

In this post, we’re gonna focus on electronic newsletters, also known as the sophisticated and sleek-sounding “eZine” or the regular old email newsletter.

An eZine is a really great tool for many reasons:

It’s cheap. No commercial printing with a hefty price tag involved.
You can send one out almost instantly. You don’t have to wait 7-10 days for it to be printed, then another 3 days to prepare the mailing, then another 7-10 days for the recipient to receive it via snail mail depending on whether you mailed it 1^st class or bulk mail, and again, no postage required.
It works. It’s the ideal opportunity to keep in touch, gain feedback from your subscribers, customers, and potential customers, and to gain new subscribers…a new audience for your business.

Now just hold on a second. Before you decide to jump on the newsletter bandwagon, there are a few crucial elements to consider. Even if you already have a newsletter, you should be following these tips so consider this a refresher and if you’re not doing the following, then make it a point to rework your publication so your readers get the most value.

Tips to be the best you can be-Zine:

Stand out: People receive tons and tons of email every day and there’s a lot of junk to wade through. If you want your electronic newsletter to get opened, your email subject line better catch your reader’s attention in an instant because if it doesn’t, it’s never getting read.
Size Matters: HTML emails can be great…unless you’re using font size 4. You’re not sending a newsletter to a 13 or 20 year old in most cases. Be sure to use fonts that are easily readable for all of us and at size that is appropriate for everyone.
Build it like Cliff Notes: No one has time to read everything that comes into their inbox, especially if it’s the length of a Stephen King novel. Your newsletter should allow subscribers to easily scan the document to determine which parts they are really interested in. Your text should not be crowded, paragraphs should be spaced and headings should be easily noticeable with larger text and/or a different color.
Personalize It: Lose the business or corporate tone and have a real conversation with your subscribers. Kind of like I do here with my blog. The way I write to you is the way I would actually speak to you face-to-face. Make your newsletter fun to read, interactive, and involve your reader by asking questions or for participation. They’ll make yours the newsletter they’re sure to read every time it arrives.
No News is Better than Fluff and Sales: If you don’t have anything to say, then skip it all together. If all you’re doing is broadcasting how great you think you are, or your entire newsletter is nothing but buy this and buy that, you’re better off utilizing your time doing something else. All you’re doing is talking and never listening and your subscribers know the difference. They won’t be fooled with all your sirens of “only the first 10 people who purchase,” or “get this but only for the next 2 hours.” They’ll unsubscribe faster than you can say “My friend, so and so, is offering my subscribers the world for only $19.95.”
Lighten Up: Skip the oodles of images and media and give them what they want…great content. If you have an audio or video, link it back to your website.
Full Disclosure: Your subscribers want to know their email is safe in your hands. Be sure you have clearly stated your privacy policy and they know where to find it. Also make it easy for them to unsubscribe by making it easily visible at the bottom of your newsletter.
Plano Text: If you’re intent on having an eZine design that is dependent on tons of images, be sure to always include a text version as well. Not everyone turns images on in their email client and some opt to receive text only emails just to keep things nice, tidy, and neat.

Last but not least, you need a good distribution company to deliver your newsletter and so you can track your subscribers as well as who is opening what messages and clicking on what links.

We’ll talk about that in detail another time. Until then, I hope you’ll take what I’ve given you today and apply it in your own newslettering!

Ciao ‘til Thursday!

More tips for hardening your WordPress site

Posted on April 15, 2010
Filed Under Tips & Tricks, WordPress | View Comments

If you’ve been following along, you’ve learned a thing or two over the past week and a half about securing your WordPress site by changing your username and password, installing some plugins and backing up your database.

It’s not rocket science, really, it’s just something many of us don’t take seriously…until it’s {insert dramatic “da-da-da-daaaaa”} too late.

Here are some more tips to keep your WordPress blog or website as secure as Alcatraz.

Keep your WP version up-to-date. Good Lord people, this really should be a no-brainer. Why are you still using out of date versions of WordPress? Do you realize how much time those slimy little hackers spend, sitting in their parents’ basements, eating M&M’s, drinking Red Bulls and trying to find vulnerabilities in older versions of WordPress and many other applications? Download the latest version. Now. Or if you installed WordPress through your web host’s one-click install or Fantastico, then you can upgrade from there (but remember to backup before you upgrade!) Geez, at least make it challenging for them to break into your site.
Secure your wp-admin folder. It should only be writable by your user account! If you don’t know how to change directory permissions, then do yourself a favor and find out or call your web hosting company. This practice is called chmod where you can change the read and write permissions on files and directories.
Change your table prefix. Many SQL-injection attacks assume your WordPress table_prefix is “wp_,” which is the default. If you’re installing a fresh WordPress and you have the option to choose your table_prefix, please do it and don’t choose wp_ or wordpress_ or wrdpress_ or any variation. This is not to guarantee your tables are secure, but it may keep many SQL-injection attacks at bay.
Read this step-by-step account on hardening your WordPress site. It advises that you do the obvious and the not-so-obvious, like securing your wp-config.php. Most people only use the one-click install and leave it at that. By doing so, they leave themselves wide open for an attack. Pay special attention to the fact that in most cases, you’re site is hosted on a shared server and just because you are taking precautions to protect your site doesn’t mean the hundreds of other sites being hosted on the same server are which makes you vulnerable!

Now remember, all of my excellent advice does absolutely NO good unless your actual computers are secure. If you don’t have antivirus software that includes protection and detection of malware, spyware, and trojans, as well as Internet and email controls then you’re setting yourself up for hours, days, or even weeks of cleanup after an attack on your computer. That is, of course, if the attack didn’t completely wipe out your computer all together.

I’m pretty conscious about security and I have 3 computers at home, one of which is a laptop that I don’t use very often. It’s older, slow and I really only use it to check email or grab a recipe online when I’m away from my office or just piddling around the house.

One day a few weeks ago I opened my laptop and there was a message from Microsoft that I had been infected…or so I thought. Me being the expert at spotting suspicious messages, I quickly noticed that not only was the message not using proper English, something Microsoft would not dare let slip, but there was also a misspelled word. I wouldn’t have noticed any of this at first glance and I actually read it several times as it was hounding me to “click here” to download a fix. At that point I knew I had a virus.

Next thing I know this little virus or trojan or whatever it was kept opening Internet Explorer and trying to connect to something. I immediately disconnected it from the Internet and then began the cleanup process. See, I had let my antivirus software lapse on the laptop. Not because I just didn’t want to, but because I hardly ever use it and I just kept thinking I’ll take care of it next time. Well the little buggers got me before I got around to it.

Since then I have installed Trend Micro Internet Security Pro and it has far surpassed my expectations as far as any antivirus program I’ve used in the past. It has everything you need, protecting your computer, you from downloading infectious files online but it won’t even allow me to visit a url if that site has been flagged as suspicious, containing malware, spyware or is just plain bad.

Bonus is you don’t need a copy for every computer you own. You can install it on up to 3 computers which saves you money as well as headaches. I highly recommend.

Now go forth and protect yourself.

WordPress security plugins and why being backed up is a good thing.

Posted on April 13, 2010
Filed Under Tips & Tricks, WordPress | View Comments

So last week I talked about the enormous pain in the a*s you will be faced with if when your WordPress site gets hacked. Trust me when I tell you it’s not something you want to deal with. On Thursday I talked about the importance of starting out with an unguessable, unhackable username and password…something not enough of us take seriously.

You can catch up by reading that post about WordPress login security here. Today, though, I’m going to share a few of my favorite WP plugins with you that you can either snag yourself or ask your web developer to install for you.

Now, there are tons of plugins out there that claim to secure your site but I can only vouch for the ones I use on the blogs I manage for myself and my clients.

Best WordPress Security Plugins

WP Security Scan: Their site claims that this plugin, “Scans your WordPress installation for security vulnerabilities and suggests corrective actions. –passwords – file permissions – database security – version hiding – WordPress admin protection/security.”

WP Malwatch: According to their site, “WP Malwatch is a WordPress security plugin scanner designed to help alert you when hackers have been at work inside your blog.

Bad Neighborhood Login LockDown: From their website, “Login LockDown records the IP address and timestamp of every failed WordPress login attempt. If more than a certain number of attempts are detected within a short period of time from the same IP range, then the login function is disabled for all requests from that range. This helps to prevent brute force password discovery. Currently the plugin defaults to a 1 hour lock out of an IP block after 3 failed login attempts within 5 minutes. This can be modified via the Options panel. Administrators can release locked out IP ranges manually from the panel.

AntiVirus: This basically is a plugin which will provide antivirus protection for your blog.

As I mentioned, I’ve seen these plugins work and I recommend you install them…sooner rather than later.

Now another important thing to do whether or not you are worried about your blog being hacked is to do regular backups.

BACKUP BACKUP BACKUP. I can’t say it or stress it enough.

Even if your site, database or server gets hacked, if you have a good backup of your site files AND the database, at least you have a fighting chance of restoring everything with only some minor headaches.

My favorite backup plugin is WP EZ Backup. It allows you to backup archives of your site file as well as your database, all from your WordPress dashboard.

If you’re relying on your web hosting company to backup the files on your server, then you’re going to be very surprised when you actually have to contact them one day because:

Unless your hosting company specifically tells you they do daily backups, which is highly unlikely with most hosts, then you are going to be limited with what they have. It might be weekly, monthly, or even longer intervals in which they perform backups on your server.
You will probably have to pay a hefty amount for them to restore a backup.
You just lost any custom changes you made to your site or blog since that backup point.
There is no guarantee your site wasn’t infected at the time of that backup point.

You must make or schedule backups of your files regularly. Just as you should be doing with your computer, this is key to keeping your files safe, secure and up-to-date.

Database Backup

Backing up your database is even more important than backing up your files. Why? Because everything you enter into WordPress (i.e. pages, posts, comments, registered users, activated plugins, WordPress options, etc.) is stored in a database. If your database is lost, corrupted, or hacked into, you will lose all that information or spend the next few days or weeks cleaning it up.

Trust me. It’s not fun but you can avoid a major pain in the a*s by being backed up regularly. Errr…

Anyway. Tune in again on Thursday when I share some extra tips on securing your WordPress blog.

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Welcome to In The Worx! This blog is dedicated to the start-up business owner and the savvy solo entrepreneur...because after all, as business owners, isn’t everything always In The Worx?