Author: Mike Lazear

Our First WordPress Theme Is Now Available!

By on May 15th, 2019

RedPoint has officially been released

The wait has been well worth it! We are proud to announce 515’s Media’s first free WordPress theme, available for release today. Our theme is called RedPoint, fully designed and developed by Eric Black and named after the challenging climbing technique of ascending a tough route without falling/hanging from your rope.

Much like the name, 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. RedPoint is ideal for authors, bloggers, agents, physicians and anyone else running a small to medium-sized online business. If you are ready for your business website stand out from other WordPress sites in 2019, 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

Some of our clients are already reaping the benefits of RedPoint. If you are interested in utilizing this amazing franewirj for your business site or would like any assistance installing it feel free to let us know!

We hope you enjoy our new theme. Stay tuned for more to come this year!

Sincerely,
Mike, Eric, Chris and the rest of the 515 Media team.

Threatening Spam is 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.