After the design, Tim coded each site. The main corporate site, leavittpartners.com, is built using WordPress and features three Custom Post Types: the slideshow on the homepage, the homepage content and the Team page.

The main Team page is broken up into staff levels but each worker is entered into the system the same way. A checkbox is used to differentiate their level. Also, another checkbox is used to flag if the worker is part of one of the several different sub-teams in the Leavitt Partners corporation. The individual team page highlights the workers accomplishments and also calls in their author RSS feed from the blog as well as any news highlights.

The blog is a straight forward WordPress install that functions like a typical blog. The newsroom, powered by NewsCactus, is a custom theme built around the NewsCactus framework.

We are very pleased with the result and hope these three sites will help Leavitt Partners continue to grow.

Leavitt Partners Homepage

Leavitt Partners Team Page

Leavitt Partners Team Single Page

Leavitt Partners Newsroom

Leavitt Partners Blog

Keeping your site secure or safe from hackers is not always easy but is something you need to be aware of. One thing I encourage you to do just in case your site is compromised is to always have a back up of your files and database. As a start, one plugin that can help with this is named BackWPup ( www.backwpup.com ). You can set this plugin to backup your files and database daily, weekly, monthly, or if you feel even hourly. But you can have it email it to you, save it to another server via FTP, or even save it to your DropBox account.

There are a few steps that you can take from the beginning when you first setup your WordPress site. The first thing to do is do not use the default table alias. WordPress by default will suggest that it use “wp_”. If you are only going to use the database for your site and not add any other tables I would suggest you take it off all together, but to make it even more secure use a different alias.

If you already have a site up and running and just want to take what you have now and make it secure here are the list of plugins and what they do:

• Change the login URL
  By default WordPress uses your URL / wp-login. To make it more secure  you can change the URL to be used to login. Sometimes people want /manger, /login, or /admin. Whatever it is that you choose you can use one of these plugins to change it from the default
  - Ozh’ Simpler Login URL – Link
  - Peter’s Login Redirect – Link
  - Custom Login and Admin URL’s – Link
• Limit Login Attempts
  By default WordPress does not limit that amount of tries to log into the Admin. It will instead inform the user instantly that it is not correct and allow them to try again. So using one or even both of these plugins will help you limit this and track what is going on
  - Limit Login Attempts – Link
  - Login LockDown – Link
• Find Out What Security Holes Your Site Is Susceptible To
  Run tests on your site to see what security holes may appear in your site. It is a full time job to stay on top of what the latest security risks are out there. So to help know what your problems are run one, or both plugins to evaluate your sites holes and close them up as you can
  - Ultimate Security Checker – Link
  - Secure WordPress – Link

These are just a few ways you can secure your WordPress site just using plugins. There are other ways that I may expound on at a later time but it requires editing code, editing configuration settings on the server, and even updating the .htaccess on the server.

Bonus Thought:
Another thing that I would encourage all to do that does not make your site a little more secure is in your robots.txt file that you have available to the search engines is to have them ignore your wp-content directory. There is no reason they need to go through these files. To do that you can add the following to your robots.txt file:
Disallow: /wp-admin
Disallow: /wp-includes
Disallow: /wp-content/plugins
Disallow: /wp-content/cache
Disallow: /wp-content/themes
Disallow: /wp-login.php
Disallow: /*wp-login.php*
Allow: /wp-content/uploads

What plugins are you using to secure your WordPress site?

The site is built using a custom WordPress theme with 3 Custom Post Types. The client can easily update the About, Plans & Pricing and Home page. The Custom Post Types allow the client to update their FAQs easily, manage their Testimonials and Expertise sections.

A visitor can easily get their Trademark in the works on the Start Application page that collects the information needed to get quick access to a Trademark.

When it comes to site performance, there is only one caching plugin that needs to even be talked about and that is W3 Total Cache. This plugin is so complete that it is shocking. It is packed with features and accounts for every type of WordPress user. It is very easy to configure and it actually works! I run a Lacrosse news website where I recently installed W3 Total Cache. According to the Google Analytics Site Speed metric, from September 17 to October 16, the average load time was 3.47 seconds. From October 17, the day I installed W3 Total Cache, to November 16, the average load time was 2.36 seconds. That is a difference of 1.21 seconds! The plugin also shows your Page Speed Report on your Admin Dashboard so you can see how well your site is performing. Every time I visit the site I am pleased with the results.

Every once in awhile, a WordPress install will be compromised and hacked. This can cause huge headaches and hassle if you are unprepared and don’t have a backup of your site. The remedy for the problem is to backup your database and files regularly. For database backups, I use WordPress Database Backup. It is very easy to use and you can customize what database tables will get backed up. Usually you want to backup all of them. I also love it because I have automated the process so I don’t have to worry about it. The plugin can be configured to send backups on a schedule that you choose. You can have it send Once Hourly, Twice Daily, Once Daily or Once Weekly. I have my lacrosse send it Once Daily. To continue the automation, I have setup a filter in Gmail to automatically archive the message so I don’t see it come in but I know it’s there! To backup files, I have to do it manually through FTP but most hosting services will offer a solution in some form or another.

Everyone who owns a site wants to have visitors and be found on Google. I’ve found that the WordPress SEO plugin is top notch when it comes to SEO. I love how it adds an admin box below your post or page that is stacked with options. It even provides a snippet of what your page will look like when people see it in on Google Search Results. You can also set a Focus Keyword, SEO Title, Meta Description and Meta Keywords. The Focus Keyword is cool because the plugin will tell you if you are using that keyword in your Article Heading, Page Title, Page URL, Content or Meta Description. Using this plugin will make you actually think about your SEO rather then just inserting words.

Along the same lines as SEO, I highly recommend having a sitemap for your site. For this, I use Google XML Sitemaps. I like how the plugin tells me the last time a sitemap was generated. It also tells me if Google, Bing and Ask.com were successfully notified. It’s a great little plugin that will help your site get noticed.

You’re probably saying to yourself, “What about a social plugin?” To that question, I would simply reply that I prefer to use the tools provided by the developer. I think that Twitters Tweet button and the Facebook Like button are perfect. If those two don’t tickle your fancy, then I would probably use AddThis or ShareThis.

What plugins do you use?

CSS3 PIE makes some CSS3 features work in IE6 – 9. It supports border-radius, box-shadow, and linear-gradient. It works great and is super easy to set up. Unless you use it in WordPress. After some Google searching, a fair amount of testing, and a lot of grumbling I got it working in a WordPress site. It is really simple. I hope that this will save others from some headache.

1. Put the PIE.htc file in the WP Root directory and then reference it in your css as – behavior: url(“PIE.htc”);
2. All the elements that use CSS3 features will need either position: relative or position: block on them

Luke started Dr. Stoker down the right path by giving him a clean, business design. I finished off the job with a custom WordPress theme that allows Dr. Stoker and staff to easily enter in new content and keep the site fresh, just like their patients breath!

Dr. Stokers practice is off and running with great success.

Check out the site and let us know what you think!

Chad, The Beginner’s Guide to Tricking Out Your WordPress Blog
I liked this post/entry about WP because it was built and geared for the beginner. Once you installed it now what. I find these type of articles interesting because sometimes they are just so simple that I don’t even think of them. And it helps me to explain or think of other things that I feel our clients may want or need.

Mike, Web Designer’s Who Can’t Code
Twitter exploded in a debate this week when Elliot Jay Stocks boldly tweeted:

“Honestly, I’m shocked that in 2010 I’m still coming across ‘web designers’ who can’t code their own designs. No excuse.”

The world is full of talented designers trained in a wide array of media, but just like other mediums, the web offers its own constraints and limitations. Knowing how to code definitely gives you an edge, even if you don’t code the site yourself. Image resolution, measurements, typography, and browser discrepancies all play a role in what is possible, and help determine the collective best practices of the web. So does a good architect need to know how to dry wall? Maybe not. What about a fundamental understanding of construction and engineering? Absolutely. How much does a good web designer need to know about their craft in order to build a successful website? What do you think?

Mac, Content Management for Sites that Matter
I liked this article because it gets right at the core of the cost/benefit trade-off that many people don’t think enough about when building their web site. Either there’s a significant value to the work you’re doing on your site, which justifies spending some money on it and getting it done right, or there isn’t a significant value to your site, so why bother? I don’t 100% agree with them about the WYSIWIG comments, but I’ve never tried to tell a client to assume it would look identical in TinyMCE and on the public site. We’ve generally had to train them to be very careful to keep it simple. Use bold if you want, make some lists, paragraphs, links, and stuff like that, but don’t try and do anything funky or you’ll end up disappointed. Another annoying thing about TinyMCE is that even when you tweak the HTML manually in their HTML view, it often wants to “automatically fix” some of the things you did. I was trying to leave a <br /> or two between a couple of separate lists if I remember right, and it kept either taking it completely out, or turning into a paragraph, constantly leaving too much or too little whitespace, even though the HTML I manually entered would display exactly how I intended.

10 WordPress Dashboard Hacks

Mike, How Wireframing Makes Your Website Designs Better
The value of wireframing comes down to a simple idea: Wireframing forces you to think about your user interface design decisions in terms of user needs first, instead of in terms of what looks good.” While wireframing requires a little extra effort in the initial planning stages, it pays huge returns in the long run. We redesign less frequently, hit deadlines sooner, and best of all, greatly mitigate scope creep. So take your foot off the pedal, assess your client’s business objectives and user needs, and translate concepts into a tangible wireframe. You’ll be glad you did.

Luke, For Better Productivity, Communicate Less
I agree with Joel Spolsky in one of Lifehackers latest posts when he says that adding more people to a project will only slow it down. I think this is especially true in web development. Once deep into a big project a web developer knows where things are and how they are related. If you throw five of them at the same project at some point they would end up stepping on each others toes. There is a chance that if things are planned out right each developer could tackle a specific task and then they could put all their pieces together to make the final piece. To do that though a lot of planning and meeting together would have to happen. This will probably lead to more disagreements and toe stepping. For those reasons I think getting the few people needed on the project and keep them there is the best way to accomplish a web dev project.

I know that may seem a bit confusing, but let me give an example. Say I have an “About” page, and that “About” page has three child pages; “Who I Am”, “What I Do”, and “Why I Do It”. Now let’s also say that my “About” page doesn’t have any actual content, it’s just a container for the other three pages, and I just want to redirect my visitors to the “About | Who I Am” page without ever hitting the “About” page. Well, here’s how I do that.

First we need a page template that we can use for the “About” page that will do all the magic for us:

In a new file in your theme folder called redirect_down.php (you can really call it anything you want, this is what I used), put the following:

<?php

/*
Template Name: Redirect Down
*/

// grab the direct children pages of this page
// (both child_of and parent are needed)
$sub_pages = get_pages(array('child_of' => $post->ID, 'parent' => $post->ID, 'sort_column' => 'menu_order', 'number' => 1));

$URI = get_permalink($sub_pages[0]->ID);

// redirect the user down one level in the tree
header('Location: '.$URI);

How this works is it finds the first child of the page you are on, grabs the URI for it, and redirects you to that page.

Now when I create my “About” page (the one with no content), I set my page template to “Redirect Down” in the template drop down, and voilà, when a visitor clicks on the “About” link, they automatically get redirected to the “About | Who I Am” page, no questions asked. If I had pages under the “Who I Am” page, and it was just a container for those, I could also set my template for the “Who I Am” page to “Redirect Down”, and when my visitor clicked the “About” link, it would redirect to the “Who I Am” page, which would then redirect to the first child page.

To complete the collection… in one of the projects I worked on recently, we had a situation where if a child page link was clicked, we needed to redirect up the tree to the parent page. This is basically the same thing, just the other direction, but also a bit easier to code. Here is how it is achieved:

In a new file in your theme folder called redirect_up.php (again, you can call it anything you want, this is just what I used), put the following:

<?php

/*
Template Name: Redirect Up
*/

// redirect the user up one level in the tree
$URI = rtrim($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], ' /');

$URI = substr($URI, 0, strrpos($URI, '/') + 1);

if ( ! in_array($URI, array('', '/'))) {
	header('Location: '.$URI);
}

The way this works, is it grabs the URI given, and simply removes the last directory from the URI. (You could also find the parent ID from the $post data and use that to find the permalink, much like the previous template, but this works for what I needed it to do.) If you have your permalinks set up properly, this should work beautifully. And again, with this one, you can set it on as many pages as you want, redirecting all the way up the tree if you wish.

Hope this helps someone. Let me know if it helped you in the comments below.

It’s always interesting working with artists from other fields, be they architects, photographers, illustrators, or otherwise. They each have a unique take on their work, and their perspective often transfers well to the web. Robert was no exception. During design meetings, his ideas and explanations were an invaluable asset to my design toolbox. The new background, for example, preserved the same earthy brown as the old website, but also brought in an actual hand-sketched blueprint Robert had used in one of his plans. The typography, decorations, textures, and other detail decisions were all passed through Robert, and each received individual feedback and revisions.

Robert McArthur Moodboard

I think the new design really speaks for itself and all parties involved are happy with the result. This is also the first time we’ve used the fixed background and I think the result is amazing. Check it out and let us know what you think!