News & Resources

With summer starting and several new WordPress security updates recently released, its time to review your WordPress site and make sure everything is up-to-date. To make it easier, we are offering a $99 WordPress Update Special. For $99 we will update your site and review your security. Services include: full site backup and database backup [...]

WordPress is a wildly popular platform for hosting website. When properly configured, it’s extremely secure, easy to use, fast, and incredibly search engine friendly. But the way WordPress achieves these distinctions is by frequent updates and tons of support from third-party plugins. It’s important to review your WordPress site a couple times a year to [...]

WordPress released security update 3.1.3 on May 25th. This update continues to improve WP security against malicious attackers. It also improves error handling on file uploads and imports. Details are available at WordPress.org.

WordPress released two security updates in April, both were small updates fixing a number of very specific security holes. If you haven’t already updated, now is a good time to get caught up. The current WP version is 3.12. As usual, it’s good to have a site backup before you upgrade. We haven’t seen any [...]

In this video we discuss four internet strategies that businesses can use to improve productivity and reduce costs: 1. Improve advertising effectiveness 2. Streamline communications 3. Create a self-service library 4. Automate transactions

If you make extensive use of custom fields in your WordPress theme then you may want to hold off on upgrading to 3.2 until you have had someone look over your theme. They have deprecated the query structure for querying custom field data in a loop. In laymen terms, if somewhere on your theme you [...]

WordPress released another security update last week, version 3.0.5. This update continues to tighten security holes where users with logins could possibly access content or privileges higher than their appropriate security level. If you have untrusted users on your site, this update is important. It’s always good to keep your WordPress version current on these [...]

WordPress released a “critical” security update late last week. It fixes a security hole in a core library. This is just a security fix, there are no new features or enhancements.

Unfortunately, overhead costs keep climbing and we have to adjust our labor rates accordingly. We haven’t had a rate increase in several years,  so hopefully this one will last a while also. 2011 Labor Rates: Prepaid WordPress Labor Blocks: 1 hour – $120 3 hours – $300 5 hours – $500 10 hours – $1,000 [...]

Most websites have simple contact forms that collect data from site visitors and email it to a specific contact. This is great for low volumes of responses, but it doesn’t give you an easy way to collect and manage dozens or hundreds of responses without slogging through pages and pages of emails. One of our [...]

WordPress version 3.0.3 was released on December 8th. This is related to the last security update but only affects sites with remote publishing enabled. Remote publishing is OFF by default, so unless you have enabled it, you do not need to worry about this update. If you are using remote publishing, this update is highly [...]

When your target customer finds your site, what do you want them to do? Be entertained, learn something, contact you for more info, buy something online? Do you want different audiences to do different things? I talk to a lot of people who say they need a website for their business, but when I ask [...]

Who will be coming to your website? Don’t let the word “audience” throw you. It means anybody who would be using your site.  Possible audiences include existing customers, members of your organization, prospective customers or members, people looking for cheap car insurance, and stay-at-home-Moms. The more precisely you can define your audience, the easier it [...]

Sometimes people get so caught up in what they want the website to look like, they forget the basics like “why”. And even if you know the basics, it’s good to be able to communicate them to the people who are designing your site. In the following series we will look at five questions to [...]

MainStreetOpen’s Live Live Taming CSS Download Recording (288M) Our next Live Lab webcast will be Tuesday, August 24 at 2:00pm CDT. This lab is FREE and open to the public. The topic is Taming CSS. Adam will take your questions on CSS and show you how to tame style sheets and make them do what [...]

In our live labs we talk about how to customize premium themes. This session was on the iThemes Builder theme. The recording is here. (438M)

In our live labs we talk about how to customize premium themes. This session was on the iThemes Flexx theme. The recording is here. (211M)

In our live labs we talk about how to customize premium themes. This session was on the iThemes Architect theme. The recording is here. (128M)

If you missed our live iThemes customization lab last week, we have a special treat for you. We recorded the session and it is available for download here. (312M) In this session Adam talks about how to customize iThemes Essence theme and shows you how step-by-step.

Some developers have tried to paint WordPress as a great blogging platform, but not a “real” CMS (content management system). While most professional WordPress developers don’t agree, the lack of custom content types has been a continued weakness of the platform. Who needs custom content types? Let’s say you’re building a site for a real [...]