Our Special WordPress Theme

If you’d like some customization done on the theme, I highly recommend going to our sister site GazelleThemes.com for an awesome and affordable Pro Package for Clean Home. Right off the bat, this has blurb customizations, new color schemes and an improved design (not to mention full customization support)! Unfortunately, due to time constraints, we cannot help users with the free-use GPL theme you’ll find on WordPress.org.

Today marks a big day for us, we’ve released the same custom theme that cloaks this very site! Well, it is a very heavily modified version of this theme, but it retains the style that we’ve got going on. I am rather partial to my minimalism themes (just check out my personal site) but this way it remains clean and sparkly.

Without further ado, I present Clean Home (v 1.2.1), our house theme. You can download it for free now right here. So what’s special about this theme? Let me list the ways:

• Lightweight - A grand total of two images, both 2×6. The rest is XHTML and CSS.
• Minimalistic - No more distracting of your users, with our theme, your content stays king.
• Attention Grabbing - With a semi-customizable (1.1.3) blurb, you can say something right away that people just have to read.
• Full Widget Support - I even took care of some all (1.1.3) of the standard widgets’ CSS for you.
• Valid XHTML and CSS - As long as you stay valid on your end…
• GPL License – New! – Do what you will with the theme!
• Multiple Widget – Now with three sidebars (1.1.4) for maximum customization: top navigation, blurb, and sidebar.
• (Pro) Fully customizable blurb - select between hidden, random phrase, image, and per-post assigned text.
• (Pro) Adsense - three separate locations for Adsense integration.
• (Pro) Color selection - Over 7 color schemes.
• (Pro) Style selection - 2 distinct styles, selectable from inside the options.
• (Pro) Feedburner integration - an email subscribe button plus automatic feed redirection.
• (Pro) Fully customizable Home Page - select different categories and how many articles to showcase!

If you’d like some common custom options, visit our sister site Gazelle Themes for cheap purchasing options for the Pro Package. Otherwise, this is just our way of giving back to the wonderful open source community that makes our business possible.

Go ahead and download it now! Feel free to let us know what you think in the comments! Enjoy!

Check out our home page for any Missouri Web Design help you may need!

Speed Up Web Installs with SSH

A lot of people who are new to the whole web hosting scene figure out FTP pretty quickly because of it’s intuitive drag-and-drop interface. Often, this is the go-to technique for people installing WordPress, Joomla! or Drupal (among others). However, we can find a faster way to install WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal. We’ll use a combination of FTP and SSH to speed the process up.

The problem:

These software packages can take forever to upload! Not only are the files much larger because they are uncompressed, they are numerous, often hundreds if not thousands of separate files. The lag between initiating each transfer may be small but between hundreds of files…. you get the idea.

Let’s take a quick example with fresh Joomla! 1.5.7 install:

• Zipped: 1 file @ 5.75mb
• Unzipped: 3,914 files @ 12.6mb

Now imagine FTP‘ing these onto your server, which would be less hassle?

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Understanding Web Statistics

Web statistics packages are now mainstream and very much accessible to the average web administrator; in the past, this wasn’t always the case. When Google bought Urchin in April of 2005, it was already an industry leading company specializing in providing an statistical package to webmasters allowing them to track pageviews, clickthroughs, sales, bounce rates and more for each individual user. Now, it is the number one analytics package available online, it is free, and it is extremely popular.

So let’s learn a little about web analytics. While it is a great tool and gives insight into your most important of commodities, your users, it has its limitations.

Basic Statistics

There are several statistics available with even the most rudimentary analytics program. These include page views, visits, pages per visit, bounce rate, average time on site, and percentage of new visitors. Let’s break these down:

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jQuery AJAX Contact Form

Today I am going to speak a little bit about a quick and easy way to make a jQuery AJAX Contact Form that employs a honeypot to foil pesky email bots. You can also check out the demo here to get an idea of how the end product will act. You can use the form anywhere you like, but a courtesy link somewhere is appreciated. It is released under the Creative Commons Attribution License. Let’s rundown the goals:

• A safe form with sanitation.
• Load success or error messages dynamically without leaving the page.
• Descriptive error messages detailing why the entered values failed validation.
• A honeypot to beat the bots.

That may sound like quite a tall order, but in fact, it can be put together fairly quickly with the tools that are available online. If you don’t feel like learning about how to create a form and just want the form. Go ahead and download it here, be sure to change the html to sendmail.php and the email address in the same file. Other wise, read on!

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What Is Open Source?

Open Source, of the software type, is an umbrella term for software whose code base (or underlying design plan) is available for public use and scrutiny. It is usually maintained by a community of volunteers or by paid employees of companies that also utilize the software in business. There are many popular open source projects that range from stand alone operating systems like Ubuntu to online developmental frameworks like Ruby on Rails.

While open source can at first seem a little confusing, the benefits are very clear. Privately developed and marketed software is considered “closed source” because interested parties cannot download the code base for personal reuse or examination. Popular closed source programs would be Microsoft Windows or Adobe Photoshop. Open source software is often free to download and reuse.

Some of the open source projects that commonly pop up in our projects are content management systems, blogging software, and forum software. Here are some popular ones:

• WordPress. A popular, free, and open source blogging software that runs online.
• Drupal. A free content management system. It is open source and quite popular.
• Joomla!. While not as popular as Drupal, Joomla! is also free and open source.
• PunBB. A common, free, and open source forum software that enables visitors to have conversations.

By utilizing these open source programs (and many, man more), Mid Missouri Web Design stays at the front of the curve and keeps prices low. Because we have hundreds of eyes scanning your site’s design, your’s will be among the most secure on the internet.