Red Kite Creative

Launches

Announcing our new service: WP Minder

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I love WordPress, and I’m glad it’s been so good for so many of my clients. I like supporting my WordPress clients because they tend to be the ones who are the most keen on really using their sites to benefit their customers and grow their businesses.

WP Minder logoWP Minder came out of a desire to help those clients in a proactive way – by taking the many technical demands of owning and running a WordPress site off their plate, so to speak, so they can concentrate on running their businesses and creating great content. Most small business owners I know don’t want to be their own tech support and don’t have an IT staff to manage it either.

WordPress maintenance is very important, and too often it’s ignored – until something bad happens.

With WP Minder all those technical things and more are handled for you. That includes daily and weekly backups so that if your site gets hacked, it can be recovered quickly and easily. It includes keeping WordPress and plugins up to date. It includes security audits to improve site safety.

Benefits available with WP Minder:

  • 24/7 security monitoring and malware cleanup;
  • Access to a library of over 30 professional WordPress video tutorials;
  • Database cleanup;
  • Personal site checks to make sure everything is running smoothly;
  • Plugin and theme installs;
  • Premium plugin and theme updates;
  • Site migration;
  • Included or discounted support hours;
  • Performance testing and recommendations.

If you own a WordPress site, I encourage you to check out the plans. They’re designed specifically for small businesses and provide the most protection and support at an affordable price. It’s so much less stressful and usually much less expensive to protect a site than it is to try to salvage it after a hack or a server failure – and servers do fail, make no mistake.

Thanks for checking out WP Minder!

Two New Website Launches: PRS Septic Services and Ace Chem-Dry

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Our latest launches: two Colorado company websites – one for our long-term client Portable Rental Systems, and the other for Loveland-based Ace Chem-Dry.

PRS Septic screenshotPortable Rental Systems recently expanded into a new industry, septic cleaning and pumping. They had content related to the new field on their existing website but the work had grown to the point where they felt they needed to spin it off into a new site.

We created a new website, loosely modeled on the five-year-old original, but focused entirely on content for the new niche. We removed that content from the existing website at launch.

The new site was built in Concrete5, a lightweight CMS that allows the client to edit content, add pages on the fly, and manage custom functionality easily. It’s not as powerful as WordPress, but is also less expensive to build; Concrete5 fits perfectly with their business needs and lets them handle everything they need to do with the site on a day-to-day basis.

Ace Chem-Dry screenshotLoveland-based carpet cleaning company Ace Chem-Dry had a page within the Chem-Dry company site, but came to us looking for a separate website where they would have more freedom to present their own unique content. We set them up with a custom WordPress site that includes a multi-page appointment scheduling form similar to the one found on the master Chem-Dry site, but scaled down to fit their needs. We also made a template with custom fields to enable them to manage the coupons on their new Specials page quite easily.

Two new website launches

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So far in September Red Kite has launched two Colorado company websites – one for the non-profit Atmosphere Conservancy, and the other for Clear Surroundings Organizing.

Atmosphere Conservancy screenshotThe Atmosphere Conservancy was using an older custom WordPress theme that had begun to break as new WordPress versions were introduced. We replaced the old theme with a new custom one, including many of the same design elements but with a more modern look and feel. The site got a slideshow and project slider on the home page, but the most important change was the splitting of two long pages for News and Projects into individual News and Project blog posts. This added more focused content pages to the site (good for Google) and makes those sections more readable in smaller chunks.

Clear Surroundings is a clean, uncluttered theme that reflects the owner’s status as a professional organizer. A gallery will be added soon; for now the site has a home page slider, rotating testimonials and a simple contact form.

Two new WordPress sites launched

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In the past two weeks Red Kite has launched two new sites: Beyond the Brochure and Reduce-My-Property-Taxes.com. Both are WordPress sites with custom themes, and both include some custom development work:

  • Beyond the Brochure has embedded videos from Brightcove that play in a custom lightbox;
  • Beyond the Brochure has a private section where auto dealers can login and retrieve video links or code snippets for their websites;
  • Reduce-My-Property-Taxes.com has a PHP-based tool that retrieves and displays county tax info from a .CSV file that the client can easily maintain.

Both sites were fun to design and build, since they were different than the typical small business sites I’ve been working on lately. Please check them out!

When a client goes above and beyond

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One of my clients earlier this year had request three matched sets of HTML templates so that she could use them to revise three websites for her employer. This client was just learning HTML and had a lot of questions and a lot of requirements; and did an enormous amount of upfront research. I don’t think I’ve ever had a client that prepared before.

Anyway, today she wrote me to let me know that all three sites have relaunched. She really did an awesome job with my templates, utilizing every element she requested I add; it was a lot of work considering she was new to coding at the start. The new sites are Brayden Automation, Energy Sentry and Wirelynx.

CSU Environmental Learning Center

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The Colorado State University Environmental Learning Center came to Red Kite looking for help with a few things:

  • A website that was standalone, not lost amid the larger site run by Warner College;
  • A way to accept online payment for registration and membership without going off-site;
  • A site where they could have their own unique look and feel (again, different than the department);
  • A way to have a large number of forms more easily managed;
  • A place where staff could view staff-only info;
  • And most importantly, a site they could edit and add to themselves.

CSU ELC screenshotWe obliged. The new ELC website has all of these features and more, including two calendars (one public and one for internal use), a blog, and a few photo galleries from various programs.

We used WordPress, our content management system (CMS) of choice, to handle the backend. The ELC has a number of editors that have access to different parts of the site (this access is managed in WordPress, too).

We recreated a number of forms, some of which were available on the old site only as PDF downloads. We used the venerable Gravity Forms plugin to make great-looking forms with extra features like conditional sections that display only when certain criteria are met.

One very important feature was ecommerce. The ELC worked with CSU to get an Authorize.Net account for their organization. We incorporated Authorize.Net’s provided payment form into the site, and connected it to our Membership and Program Registration forms to give a pain-free online purchase experience to those who chose to use it.

The ELC was very happy with our work and is making the most of their new site, blogging and adding in new programs as they are needed. We were happy to help!