Flosites

We are so happy to launch a New Project for the very incredibly talented Tara Lynn Sen this week! But what made it special was her thank you note to our team for her project below:

 

“Dear Ross, Jenny, Alina and the entire Flosites Team,

I cannot thank you enough for your artistry, expertise and endless patience to bring my new brand and blogsite to life. I LOVE it so much- it is vibrant and sexy and sophisticated and I have so much pride giving out my URL :) I feel like the complete package is ME and I have you all to thank for that- I finally feel like my online presence reflects the energy that I have for my couples and that is huge as I forge my business ahead. You guys are so talented and I am so grateful for all of your efforts.

I look forward to using Flosites as my business continues to evolve and grow and I will definitely point anyone who asks your way.

Thank you, thank you, thank you and I wish you all blessed 2012s!

Best Wishes,

Tara”

 

After months of planning we have finally released our first John Doe Theme from Flothemes. 

We are currently accepting only 10 first clients, as an early bird special before a full release. We will be releasing only one theme at a time, with a limited number of sales to keep our themes fresh and premium.

The John Doe Theme is not just a blog, but a blog site, with galleries, styled information pages, dynamic contact form, blog with social integration from Facebook, twitter, pinterest and google+. These are among a few neat options under the hood of the new John Doe Theme. Hop on over to the main page to take it for a test drive, or sign up to be one of the first 10 to own a Flotheme!

Once again we want to thank everyone for helping us with ideas, beta testing! this is just the start of something that will surprise and benefit many in our industry! But for now, it will be just one step at a time! Thank You!

Also look out for the chance to win a free download of the John Doe Theme from the Flothemes home page through the tweet to win option!

Flosites Team

Facebook, blogging, sharing and commenting are all vital parts of your interactive connection with your clients.

Currently Facebook is not only the largest social network that was ever created (probably time waster as well) but with the help of many wordpress plugins (EG WPBook) this functionality allows you, your friends, and followers integrate and understand what you are promoting or trying to communicate easily from your blog to Facebook.

Recently Facebook updated its method of comment integration, called Facebook Comments.

So what is the point? It sounds good to have your comments integrated to Facebook, as to most it is just good functionality, but before you connect your online presence fully to Facebook, we wanted to list a few pros and cons for doing so.

Pros

• Get Connected. Integration to the most popular social network, connecting both your online presence and theirs together through an easy read to use comment system sharing both comments from Facebook and your blog together. Its a great way to attract more or new commenters to your posts.
• Connectivity. Your readers can also directly comment using an aol, hotmail man or yahoo account.
• Stop unwanted commenting. There is no need to worry about mystery comments, or to moderate, approve or to delete inappropriate comments as Facebook not only weeds out spam comments, but people must be signed in and to be an identity to even comment. This is beneficial to not deal with unknown or unpleasant comments on posts for your business or against your clients.
• Social Commenting Relevance. Facebook shows the most relevant comments from every user and relocates them to the top of the comment list automatically, optimizing the awareness and interaction for commenting.

Cons

• Customization – If you have invested in a fully custom blog/blogsite Facebook comment integration can be a bit of an eye sore. Of course this varies on your color palette you have for your site. But on the pro side, having the comment area look like a Facebook comment box, will help the interactive functionality for users to understand what it is, and may attract more comments.
• Multiple Accounts – Facebook comments do not allow commenting with a google ID, and a twitter account. Why this doesn’t work is a mystery, but for now its a one time choice, Facebook integration, or twitter.
• Old comments – you will have to say good bye to these, as the plugin doesn’t allow a smooth integration of existing comments to the new Facebook commenting plugin that overrides your comment section, meaning you should start from scratch with your comments.

Conclusion

So what is the verdict? In general apart from losing your existing comments and stylization options, Facebook for your business PR is a must. However, it is not essential and depending on how you market your business the choice may be beneficial, but if you want to harness the potential to increase your number of comments, or socialize with your followers, clients and visitors, Facebook comments are a superb and easy way to do so.

 

Here are a few examples of blogs that we have integrated into Facebook:

• http://atrero.com
• http://dpphotography.co.uk
• http://jasongroupp.com

Would you like to be next? Drop us a quick email.

I’m sure most of the people I work with directly already know, but for those who don’t, I’m pretty dedicated to the quality of work I produce. But no matter who you are, and how amazingly stealthy your work ethic, sometimes forces beyond our control step directly into our path of greatness, and happily sling disasters, tragedies, and whatever else it can pile on your plate- not like you had anything else going on, of course.

I’ve written posts on the importance of balancing life and work (here) but I think it deserves revisiting-especially after the week I’ve had. Personally speaking, the last week for me has been hectic to say the absolute least (think: rain water leading to flooding, leading to ceiling collapsing, hotels-complete with our two cats, moving across town in 3 days, etc. etc); but no matter what happened, I made sure to keep my coworkers & clients directly in the loop. Not to say we didn’t realize some cracks in our system, but that’s important to note too.

During the whole ordeal, it really helped me realize what the disconnects are when something tragic happens in our life, and how we handle that professionally can absolutely make all of the difference once we pick up the pieces.

 

Communicate, nay, word barf, your situation. 

Letting people know  what’s currently going on- a death in the family, an urgent sickness- whatever it is, will help allow people to be more empathetic to your situation, allowing for more support and understanding. Essentially, giving you a security blanket feeling before you even get INVOLVED. Being as open and knowledgeable as you can will also cut down on your explanation time, especially if you’ve spurned some harsh feelings for temporarily being MIA.

 

Update. Update. Update.

Remember when I said word barf? Keep this in your mind. The river of info has got to keep flowing in order to maintain any sort of normalcy with business matters, while personal matters keep spazzing out your attention span. How do you do this? twitter, facebook, email, text. The world we live in is a flurry of overextended information. Take utmost advantage.

 

Work slowly, and Build back up

This is the step I have the hardest time with. After taking a nice calm right turn out of tragedy land, I always want to hit my to-do list with mach10 force. I have to overcompensate for all of the hours I lost, I say. You know where this gets me? Overwhelmed, frustrated, and with totally bashed in productivity. After this whole hotel/moving debacle, I knew I needed to get back into high gear- and FAST.

While my french press isn’t even set up (the HORROR!), I know I can still pick 2-3 tasks, concentrate on them at a disturbing level, and I can at least have the quality of work back to normal. Today I will bring in 4-5 tasks, and repeat until I’m back to my regularly scheduled maximalized craziness I happily call my work load.  I liken the idea to juggling- who starts juggling with 6 balls? No one! And no one would expect you to, but if you start slow and build up, you will absolutely get to your awesome sauce A-game within no time.

What about you? How do you find ways to ease back into normalcy after a tornado of crazy hit your life?

Until next time!

xo,
jne

I think at some stage everyone has had the heart breaking experience of a hard drive with lots of information, photos or data which you wished you had saved somewhere else, disappear, to then lose several days trying to salvage it, restore and to some extents send it to the Big Guys to pay a large sum of cash to get the content back… well sadly, this can happen with websites and blogs if you are not careful or aware of the potential hazards online also.

Backing up your blog and any online sites is one of the most important parts of your business. It is a shame that all of your efforts put into blogging, advertising, marketing, seo and administrating your blog can go to waste overnight. Whilst the majority of hosting companies do offer backups free or at a charge to restore, many do not offer up to date backups or backups at all. Therefore making sure your blog is safe and sound, with several restoration options is important.

 

Before we get into the backups, here are a few quick plugins that should be taken into consideration for any blog!

Spam Filters!

There is nothing worse than receiving tens of hundreds of spam weekly, and whilst there are many spam options out there, the one proven and successful option for wordpress is Akismet.

Security:

If you are wanting to take security to another level, and make sure all your options are covered, here are 4 useful plugins to do so:

Login LockDown – If someone is trying to login too many times from one location Ip Address in a certain time frame, it will cause a lock on that user.

File Monitor Plus – When changes are being made to your WP, you can be notified to know every step of what goes on with your blog or site.

WP Security Scan – Think of it as an anti virus for your blog, it checks your wordpress for any vulnerabilities.

Secure WordPress – Tightens your entire wordpress site, to remove, or hide any errors that may allow hackers opportunities to access your site.

Backups!

We have created a shortlist of options to secure and backup your blog safely and easily without having to go through a trial and error solution to find which is best for you. We have made sure that all of these plugins are easy to install, provide automatic backup features and the user interface of the plugin is user friendly.

1. WP-DB-Backup – It is one of the most popular options, and is very easy to setup and install for your blog/site backups.

2. Vaultpress – This is personally our favorite, but it is a paid service but it is one that we personally have a lot of experience with and its a great solution.

3. BackupBuddy – It was created by one of the top WP providers,l and now has sleek integration to dropbox for backups. It isn’t a free solution but it has some interesting features.

notable options to mention:

MyEasyBackup – Another wordpress backup system that has a very easy to use interface and good documentation which offers easy backup options.

Automatic WordPress Backup – It is another option that uses amazon s3 servers as a backup option, but isn’t as updated as often as the above options.

These last few tips and words of advice will never fully guarantee you will be completely safe from being attacked or having malware issues with your site, but it can safe guard and greatly minimize the vulnerabilities for allowing them to happen, leaving you with a safe assured mind that your hard work one day won’t go to waste. So here is what we can recommend:

 

1. Choose a Good Hosting Company, make sure that you know their backup policy before signing up, and what options they provide. In our experience with hosting, we recommend only 2 main companies, we are not saying that they are the best of the best! but simply, if an issue comes up, they are the fastest to respond, and get the error fixed.

Blue Host:

 

HostGator:

DreamHost:

2. Protect your blog with a STRONG SOLID PASSWORD. Usually this is the easiest way to have a site/blog hacked, because the passwords are easy to guess, or simply access, leaving you vulnerable.

Lorelle has a brilliant article on blogherald all about how to choose a password which is memorable but also bulletproof.

3. Staying up to Date! One of the easiest ways to get hacked is through old or expired plugins. Make sure your plugins/widgets are updated often.

4. Regular Backups - This is mentioned above, but is your lifeline… If your blog/site crashes, gets erased or goes missing be rest assured that your backup program will restore not only missing file directories, but also your database files.

5. Keep your wordpress blog version up to date. There is a reason why they update the versions, and it isn’t always because of new shiny features… generally its to close bugs, vulnerabilities or ways which hackers can penetrate and harm your site, so be sure to make sure that your versions the latest it can be.

6. Disabling right click. Being able to disable this option will not allow people to always view your source code, or to copy your content directly.

 

If you would like to check out many more options for security plugins, we found this useful post listing 25 plugins dedicated to secure your wordpress site. Click Here.

We hope that this post helps offer a few solutions to protect your content for the future, but if you feel that we have missed some noteworthy options please let us know in the comments. Thank you.

 

Its the Biggest Birthday of the Year, Congratulations to the USA.

In celebrating this great day, we are offering 10% off all of our interactive services, which includes all blog and portfolio blog site packages until 5:00pm EST, Tuesday 5th July.

To take advantage of this offer, simply send in your message with the offer code: FLO0704

If you would like to read more about our interactive package options, click here: http://tinyurl.com/3zc7v9y

We want to wish you all a Great Holiday from everyone here at Flosites.

 

So what exactly is a Blog Site?

You have probably heard about them several times, and have a general idea as to what they are, but still many people do not know the options and flexibility of a blog site, generally because of how the old setup for a portfolio and blog used to be.

The first blog sites, where essentially a blog with galleries. The layout was a blog, the galleries where either html or flash, usually from a drop down… which is still a great solution, if your primary model of gaining clients is through blogging, but still showcasing your gallery portfolios. However, since wordpress has progressed and will continue to adapt and change options over time, the new concept of a blog site, is more of a portfolio style site, but the blog will be within it, in the same layout.

Now what does that mean for most people:

- You may keep the conventional marketing technique of having a site, and a blog separately, but for management it is all one system.

- Improved seo, as everything is in one place, linked to each other from the home page to the blog.

- Mobile Friendly, as everything will be html, and connected it will allow for seamless viewing on mobile devices, or if you plan to take it a step further, being on a wordpress platform you have many third party plugin options to convert your site to a full mobile version.

- Flexibilty, with your blog site on wordpress it will allow many options over time to upgrade, and add new plugins to improve your social media, seo, and over time being able to update your design theme on wordpress will be more cost efficient, and save time in development, without having recreate your content as long as you keep the same functionality.

All in all a blog site is a very smart solution if you want to bring everything under one roof, to be easy to manage, enhance your google juice, and adjust with upcoming trends which being on WordPress will allow you to do this easily.

Flosites Offers several Blog Site Packages, and our most popular all in one Package which are separated as follows:

So there you have it, a broken down list of the portfolio blog site options, as well as the all in one Package. For those who really want to revolutionize their visual branded business with a new logo and portfolio blog experience online, the all in one package offers every client that.

If you are interested, check out a few of our all in one client examples:

Ed Atrero

Perez Photography

Robert Wagner photography

Jared Rey Photography

Tony Ku Photography

Benjamin Scot Photography

Chantelle Moore Studio

For a while now, we have been debating whether to create this new package or not, as it is something very exciting and fresh for us as a challenge, yet at the same time it is a creative risk. Although, our goal is to create a completely custom designed blog as a surprise for a client who knows their brand and can portray it to us to successfully enhance that with our skills. Over the last few years we as a creative agency have created a style that many people have came to love and adore, which has been a tremendous compliment for us as designers and developers so here it is, we accepted it and want to share it with you! Of course we would love to hear your thoughts and questions as at the end of the day, it is you who help us shape our business, so we would love to continue to do the same for yours.

So… what is Project Eureka then?

It’s rather simple actually which we will explain below in points, but if you have questions feel free to email, call us or drop us a line in the comments below.

1. Collection and Planning

With any branded or interactive project planning is always key, as it can easily lead from having a triumphant project or an utter flump. In this case, planning is the key, although this package differs from the regular packages as it will be completed in a short time frame, and will skip a lot of the feedback phases which come with the standard packages, therefore trust is key. It is vital that you provide us with as many details, specifications as possible as once we have received the details and confirmed what we will create together there is no turning back.

You will be provided with a list of functionalities, and layout styles to choose from if you are unsure of certain aspects for your blog, however providing a concise and exact page list, and image sizes for example is very important.

Styling and colors are also key, especially if your brand is a versatile mix of various shades, so deciding on which color you would like your base color to be is vital.

Once we have collected all the good stuff, we will have a meeting (or a few) via phone or a video chat to discuss the style and ideas fluently before we lock the project into motion, which then leads to the exciting… or nail biting stage of the surprise hidden design and development…

(Note, we do not recommend this package if you do not know your business, or brand direction.)

2. Design and Development (Surprise)

During this rather anxious stage of waiting and not knowing what to expect, you will have to start preparing your content for the blog and sub pages ready for when you see the final package.

3. Finalisation and Tweaks

Finally after your anxious wait, we reveal the curtains to show you your new custom designed blog. Our goal is that the final product will be a complete surprise, and in terms of “surprise” a joyful one! If however, you have some requests, changes don’t stress, the package offers 1 full set of changes and tweaks, to core areas such as custom fonts, colors, backgrounds, minor navigation changes, form changes and basic changes to functionality and transitions.

We do have some others options if you would like further additional changes which would be outside of our package offering but will make sure that at the end of the process you will be satisfied!

Of course, after all the bells and whistles are tweaked, you will have a well polished blog, ready to make your friends envy you and stop your viewers attention in a quick glance. We will then happily transfer any old blog content to your new blog, and get you all ready and setup to launch!

So here it is! Project Eureka, and yes, we are pretty proud about it! We genuinely hope that you too will love it! and as with anything, we are here to answer any question or doubt you may have!

Contact us for more details!

(Please Note; Due to the nature of the project, if you sign up you agree to understand our terms and conditions with the design and setup flexibility, and therefore no refunds will be provided under any circumstances, as we will promise to do our best to create the project package correctly as to any approved communication and decisions, therefore we recommend this package exclusively to those that either fully trust our style and design, or for those that know exactly what they would like a surprise result for their brand.)

It has been a while in the making, but we are finally happy to start receiving signups to Beta Test our new wordpress Blog, BlogSite and Site Themes. We will firstly be testing only our first theme, but we have several others ready to release officially after the Beta Testing Session is completed.

There will also be some awesome discounts for those who Beta Test and decide to sign up over at FloThemes.

So, you may be asking what is involved in the Beta Testing? It will be really easy… we promise!

> Simply enter your details into the signup form on Flothemes homepage.

> On Tuesday May 10th and Thursday May 12th, we will be sending login details to signed up Beta testers who are chosen.

> We simply ask you to try your best to destroy it! But, also to report any issues, or bugs to us at info@flothemes.com.

> We would also love to hear your thoughts on what you would like to see improved, or new options or functionalities added to the theme, and also for new Themes.

After we have finalised any requests, fixes or updates we will then update the rest of our pretty new themes to then release for everyone!

As a Beta Tester you will be eligable to an early bird Thank You discount, as well as several other bonuses!

We just want to thank everyone in advance, and for helping us help you in our new adventure!

The Flosites Team.

We here at Flosites are so appreciative of the past year and how much everyone has shown us here some love for the work that we do, we thought it only fitting to return the favor!

So here’s the deal, from now until Feb 14, send us an email or leave a comment below with what you’ve got going on with your current branding, and why you deserve a freshly loved brand straight from the brains and hearts of two of the best brand strategists we know (so what if we’re biased). We will choose 2 lucky winners who will receive a free consultation with Ross & Jenny, and be provided with 2 equally stellar concepts for the winner to select free of charge!

Sound awesome?

It IS! So what are you waiting for? Come and get your Flosites Brand Love! Just simply email us, or leave your answers and a way to contact you in the comments section below! Please Note that the winner of the branding package will not be subject to pay anything! This is a give away to giving back only.