The Woes of Website Project Management

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happy client website managementWebsite Project Management can have it’s “ups” and “downs”.

The “ups”, of course, are when everything goes smoothly.

  • The artwork phase starts and ends in a timely fashion.
  • Concepts are provided, the client steers the graphic designer to the next level of concept, tweaks are made and the design gracefully glides into production.
  • The design is reversed engineered into a navigable empty web site. Client is shown the development site and watches for progress.
  • Communication is maintained from both sides and all is going in the perfect direction.
  • The client has been collecting content during the art phase and during the site build out phase. How wonderful to have content ready, to be placed throughout the web site!
  • Photo galleries are installed and and the client has collected all photos to be dropped into the galleries.
  • An ecommerce package is installed and all product photos, descriptions and data have been provided by the client for ease of building the cart out. There are no snags in payment gateways and the SSL was issued without problems.
  • The site goes through final testing and the clients input for final tweaks have been made.
  • The site is ready for launch and on time.

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Chromebooks Offer Potential Value for Internet Web Developers and Writers

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chromebook advantages for business usersSince being introduced in May of 2011, Google’s Chromebook has occupied a single position within the notebook marketplace. The Chromebooks offer potential value as the Chrome browser serves double-duty as a web browser and the interface to Google’s cloud-based application software. Unlike mainstream PCs and Apple computers having vast amount of installed software applications, Chromebooks have none – all applications reside in the Google server cloud. Market share growth of Chromebooks continues to steadily grow. According to NPD Group, Google’s Chromebook accounted for 21% of laptops sold in the U.S. during the first 11 months of 2013. Their growth in part is driven by the value they provide for a relatively small investment. High reliability, application flexibility and work team collaboration tools make the Chromebook worthy of consideration for internet professionals working under extraordinary project constraints. Continue reading →

Orion Group’s Top 10 WordPress Plugins

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WordPress PluginsIn the last couple months several people have asked me what WordPress plugins are the best, which do we use on our sites, and what each plugin does.  There over 31,000 plugins in the WordPress repository, and thousands of paid plugins and add-ons available on the web.  It can be hard to figure out what to use.  So to get started, here’s a list of our top 10 plugins that we use on our latest sites. Continue reading →

How Project Force Field Protects WordPress from Brute Force Attacks

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It’s been one week since we released our plugin Project Force Field on the WordPress plugin directory, and things couldn’t be going smoother! The plugin was downloaded over 100 times, received 6 five-star reviews and 2 four-star reviews. On the Orion Group servers alone, Project Force Field has blocked nearly 3,000 brute force login attempts in the past 24 hours! So Project Force Field is doing its job well and more people are starting to enjoy the benefits. But how does it work? Continue reading →

Why Project Force Field Made My Life Easier

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pff-blogWordPress brute-force attacks are a nuisance. Not only that, they are potentially dangerous, especially if one of your users is using a not-so-great password. The amount of damage that can be caused by a cracked WordPress admin password is a bit scary.  Even if the scripts don’t guess a password these attacks can get quite heavy, spanning thousands of IPs, and causing a mass of server load that bogs down your website,  all of those login attempts require PHP to execute and your database to be queried.

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Introducing Project Force Field: Protect Your Website!

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WordPress Plugin Project Force Field Save your WordPress sites and servers from certain death during brute force attacks with Project Force Field by Orion Group!  Install the plugin and start protecting your website in under 10 seconds!

The developers at Orion Group bring superior brute force attack protection to WordPress with our new plugin, Project Force Field. By tracking failed login attempts and taking advantage of Apache’s mod_rewrite module, Project Force Field stops Brute Force Attacks from bogging down your sites and servers. Continue reading →

Chrome Bug: Text Not Loading

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chromium-logoA couple blog posts ago, I wrote about how fonts sometimes look pixelated and distorted in Chrome.  The developers at Orion Group have also noticed another issue with Chrome and text: sometimes, the text doesn’t load at all.  Sometimes, hovering over where text should be, or refreshing the page, makes the text appear.   Chrome developers are aware of the bug and you can track the progress of the issue here: https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=336476  It sounds like they are getting closer to a fix so hopefully this will be resolved soon.  But if you are a developer who needs a workaround now, here are some fixes. Continue reading →

Freshen up your old XP computer with Linux Mint

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Linux_Mint_12_On_ASUS_Eee_PCWith Microsoft ending support next month for their Windows XP and Office 2003 products there are not a lot of options available for people still using this software. If you have the money, you can always purchase a new computer with a newer operating system on it. You could also keep your computer as is, and hope that invasion of new malware waiting to be released after the deadline doesn’t come knocking on your door, well it wont knock, it’ll sneak through that open window left by lack of security updates from Microsoft. So you can either pay money or sit on a ticking time bomb? NO! There is another option, and it won’t cost you a dime! You can install a Linux-based operating system on your computer. Linux is a free and open-source operating system that was developed in the early 90s by Linus Torvalds.  Without getting too technical Linux-based operating systems are community driven, meaning that many top IT companies and professionals donate their time and efforts to create the software.

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Stop Sending Word Docs Via Email, Please! How to Use Google Docs to Write and Share

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Whether you’re working on a simple project between three people or need to share a document with hundreds of people, the old standby of emailing a Word document isn’t such a great idea. With Google Docs being a much easier system, I encourage everyone to set up an account and use this method of document sharing. Google Docs allows you to “create and share your work online and access your documents from anywhere.”

image of Google Docs logoGoogle Docs enables you to create:

  • Documents (like Word)
  • Presentations (like PowerPoint)
  • Spreadsheets (like Excel)
  • Forms, or
  • Drawings

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Microsoft is ending support for Windows XP

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That fateful day is coming, and it’s coming fast. April 8th, 2014 will mark the end of Microsoft‘s support for Windows XP and Office 2003. After that date Microsoft will no longer be providing important security updates to the operating system and office suite. With an estimated 500 million PCs still running XP this is going to be a big problem. Find out what this means for you and what you can do about it if you are still on XP. Continue reading →