creative briefing

It came to my attention in the last few days that a handful of people had been experiencing some errors when viewing this site. Many visitors had the site return a 404 Page Not Found error page, while others had their browser crash completely. One individual even reported that their anti-virus software had thrown a red flag while visiting this site. My first instinct was that one of the site’s plugins were causing the errors, but upon further investigation, I have found what I believe to be the catalyst: googlerank.info.

Before I begin describing the issue, I want to state that I do not have a permanent fix (though I do have a temporary one). The purpose of this post is to document my findings for anybody who has experienced the symptoms or is interested in helping me find and fix the underlying issue. I’ve found very little documentation on this problem thus far, so I’m hoping to provide some clarity to all others who may be searching for it.

Overview

A hidden <iframe> that points to googlerank.info has been found embedded into a handful of files that are associated with a WordPress installation. The <iframe> always appears at the very bottom of the source code, just before the </body> tag. It is possible that WordPress presents a vulnerability that allows an unauthorized user to access and alter files, thereby compromising the security of the site owner as well as the site’s visitors.

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User-generated content is not uncommon to websites today and its popularity has grown over the years with the public’s demand to have control and input over what they’re seeing on websites. Sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, and countless others will typically offer a form on the front-end of their website for users to submit content for immediate publishing, enhancing user interactivity and overall experience.

For WordPress users, this is usually a problem because the post and page-writing functionalities are hidden away in the back-end admin panel of WordPress. Not only that, but users are required to have a registered account before being able to access these functions. Add on the fact that logging into the admin panel exposes the user to a different interface and visual environment, and you’ve got yourself a bad user experience and little incentive for the user to want to submit content.

So how do you create a site that offers a usable front-end form that will allow users to publish content immediately onto your site while still taking advantage of the powerful publishing engine of WordPress?

This tutorial will break down one way of overcoming this obstacle using cantwaitforchristmas.com to illustrate examples.

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Two posts in one day? I think I’m spoiling you guys. Maybe I’m just in the giving mood be it the holidays and all…

I told you I’d be back soon with word of a new project launch. It wasn’t too long ago (or at least it doesn’t seem like it’s been that long) since I became inspired by the powerful potential of WordPress as a CMS. Three great things have spawned since then:

1. A new skillset that opened a whole new door to potential future business.
2. cantwaitforchristmas.com (read this to learn more).
3. The complete relaunch of my agency’s website in all its WordPressy glory.

Hoping to take a lesson out of my own book, the team and I began discussion of a refresh for our agency website as far back as in August. We had grown a lot as an agency and everything about the old site just didn’t do justice to who we were now, so we knew we had to start fresh. Projects came and projects went, and so did the time and bandwidth we had available to focus on building a new site.

September, October, and November passed by far too quickly, and before we knew it, December was here and we still had no new site. Enter: meeting-with-designer-that-inspired-my-WordPress-fascination. Like a shot of creative steroids, I got to work immediately and quickly turned the new layout template that our team had been kicking around for a few weeks into a fully WordPress-integrated site. That was the first night after being inspired.

Fast forward 3 weeks, a lot of WordPress hacking, plugin-customizing, CSSing, Photoshoping, and copy writing, and we arrive at 6 am Friday morning when the new site finally went live at www.vdotmedia.com. I’m pooped, but am so stoked at how everything turned out. In our moment of glory, I felt like the new WordPress rockstar (with Adii announcing his “retirement”, this possibility becomes a little more real).

Vdot Media (www.vdotmedia.com), before

Vdot Media (www.vdotmedia.com), after

The entire site, from the rotating Flash banner to our new portfolio to our RFP form, is fully WordPress-powered. And just like the promise to post my WordPress tricks for cantwaitforchristmas.com (which I haven’t delivered on just yet), I will promise to do a full write-up of the ins and outs of creating a complete agency site on this platform. I’m sure you’ll get more of a kick out of that post as our agency site is at least ten times more complicated than the single-paged Christmas countdown site.

We’ve also got our new agency blog, Simply Put, running on the site which is great because the team and I finally have a common place to expel our thoughts, ideas, and banter. I encourage all of you to check out our most recent post on the Email Standards Project and if you’re interested, do that whole RSS-subscribing thing that some of you are pretty good at.

So there you have it, a long-winded excuse for why I haven’t been too active over here in the past few weeks. I hope you’ll accept my apology.

If you’ve noticed that you haven’t heard from me in the last few days (since my Inspired post), it’s because I’ve been completely submerged in the wonders of WordPress! I had the hang of it after the first night, but I’ve spent the last few days diligently perfecting the ins and outs of this underestimated platform.

Most of my time has been dedicated to building out my new agency site. The technical development progress has now sped far beyond the development of the content for the site, so it’ll still be some time before it’s ready to launch.

But to give some proof of my progress, and to alleviate some of the WordPress energy, my buddy and I decided to run our first project marathon last night - 24 hours of pure creative magic with the end result being a polished, functional, and stylish website. With that, I present to you the launch of cantwaitforchristmas.com!

In light of the holiday season, Satish and I decided to build a simple site that would celebrate all the things everyone is looking forward to come this Christmas. For extra umph, we added a giant timer so that we could countdown the days, hours, minutes, and even seconds left til all the wonderfulness of Christmas would arrive.

I will do a follow-up post soon to share some of the tricks and techniques used in the development of this site. But in the mean time, I hope you guys can go and support my first marathon project and join us in the countdown to the official best day of the year!

If anybody is particularly feeling the holiday spirit, you can also help spread word of the site by blogging about it or sharing it with friends.

Looking forward to seeing what you’re all looking forward to this Christmas!

I met with a local distinguished graphic and web designer this past week and came out of a two and a half hour enlightened, thought-filled, and inspired. It was great to get the perspective of a formal designer (by formal I mean someone who has gotten formal education in design - whether it helped them or not) on the industry and how businesses operate in the marketplace. For the past 4 years, I’ve been running a design agency as a business professional (it may or may not come as a shock to you that I have no formal design training - just a business degree and a passion for creative work), so comparing my outlook and heuristics to that of an actual designer running a design agency was refreshing, to say the least. I’d like to think that my twist in perspective was also helpful to him, so all in all it was a enjoyable chat for both of us.

We left the Starbucks with a few takeaways and potential areas of collaboration to think about. One thing that excited me the most and made me want to rush home and get straight to work was his expertise on using WordPress as a full-fledged CMS. That’s right, the same platform that runs this simple blog used as the backbone editor for an entire website. If you haven’t already labelled me as being slow to jump on this bandwagon, then you may be skeptical about the concept like I had been prior to this conversation. I’ve read about it, but always doubted its potential to be flexible and adaptive enough for sites that require more than just the blog functionality. I stand corrected!

Eager to add a new skillset to my arsenal, I dove into the WP infrastructure the next night and came out sometime between 3 and 4 am feeling on top of the world. I’ve learned a lot in this short amount of time, and I plan on sharing a lot of these lessons soon. In the mean time, I’m happy to say that there is hope for those who’d like to believe that WordPress can be used as a CMS, and I’ve possibly figured out a way to finally advance the development process of our new agency site. Score!

Stay tuned to see what I’ve been playing with in my sandbox. :)