Author: Mike Lazear

Our First WordPress Theme Is Now Available

By on May 15th, 2019

RedPoint has officially been released!

WordPress Theme

The wait has been well worth it! We are proud to introduce RedPoint, our first free WordPress theme fully designed and developed in-house. Named after a challenging rock-climbing technique, this theme is durable, flashy, extremely customizable and ready to be tailored to your business.

A child theme of WordPress’ own Twenty-Nineteen theme (which currently has over 1 million downloads), RedPoint serves as a framework that you can rapidly build upon. That makes this theme ideal for authors, bloggers, agents, physicians…  In short, any small to medium-sized online brand.

If you are ready for your business website to stand out from other WordPress sites, this is a great place to start. You can download the latest release of the RedPoint framework below for use in your website free of charge or see a demo!

See Demo   Download Now

NOTE: If you would like to use the styles from our demo site, you must download this redpoint_custom attachment and place the folder in /wp-content/themes/, sibling to twentynineteen_redpoint!

RedPoint comes with a number of fantastic features including:

  • Powerful layout controls
  • Assign “Featured Pages” to appear on the top or bottom of all other pages
  • Easily select your theme colors
  • Easily override your theme colors on specific pages
  • Ability to choose custom fonts from Google…or use your own!
  • Flexible Mega Menus baked right into the WordPress menu editor
  • Enhanced with Advanced Custom Fields
  • Define background images on a per-page basis
  • Mix full-width and normal content within the same page
  • Lean, clean CSS – enhanced with SASS

As a result, some of our clients are already reaping the benefits of a more durable and customizable site. Contact us for help in installing or utilizing this amazing framework for your business site!

Spam: The Latest in Online Headaches for Businesses

By on March 19th, 2019

If you are a webmaster, business owner, blogger or just a decent human being, you probably are not a huge fan of spam. It is frustrating to deal with, makes email even more challenging to manage and clogs up inboxes.

We are always working to keep up-to-date on the latest anti-spam technology, ensuring our clients are not getting inundated with spam emails from their contact forms. Overall we’ve been winning the fight, but spammers have been growing more creative lately.

The latest email sample some of our clients have been receiving looks something like this:

Hello (Client Name),
You have received a submission from the contact form on (Your Website) 
Here are the message details:

From: (Spammer URL)
Email: (Spammer Email Address)
Subject: powerful backlinks for your site
Message Body:
Hello guys, I would like to make offer for you. Please buy my services from (Spam Link) or I will create negative backlinks to your website and get it removed from Google index. Please choose. I recommend that you buy my gigs to avoid losing business. If you order my gig, I will take your site to top and if no, I will spam it with bad links and get you removed from Google. I hope you understand the serious matter.

Pleasant, no? Bad grammar aside, this has the additional layer of looking threatening, like if you do not buy products or services the spammer will work their voodoo web magic to blacklist your website.

You can take it from us; these are empty threats, and they are trying to steal from you in order to make money. It’s a scam, and it’s coming in the form of contact-form spam.

So if you receive something similar to the above, do not hesitate to let us know if you are unsure. If you are having trouble telling the difference recognizing spam email from legitimate email the following list of spam or scamming warning signs may help:

  • Poor grammar, spelling errors
  • Too many links in an email or links from URLs that have long domains or a lot of numbers in the domain are spam at best and at worst a phishing scam
  • Messages from an email address you do not recognize immediately trying to offer you a product or service
  • Messages labelled as potentially dangerous by your email provider
  • Password reset prompts or bank account login requests from an unknown source that you did not authorize. This is true even if you recognize your bank’s logo. Always look at the “from” email address. If you get a message with a USBank logo but the “from” email address has no mention of “US Bank” then it is almost certainly a phishing attempt on your account.

Overall we do our best to stay on top of the latest trends in online scamming to help our clients. If you are ever concerned about an email you received please do not hesitate to get in touch with us.