Pleth Adds 2 New Team Members
This past week my partners and I have been busy making preparations to add 2 new members to our team; Steven Trotter and Craig McCoy, both of Jonesboro, are going to bring a ton of expertise to our team and infrastructure. I have been connected with both of these guys for a while on Twitter and Facebook and have admired their work from afar for quite some time. I am extremely anxious to collaborate with them on future projects as well as introducing them to our existing clients to see how we can improve on what we are already doing.
The guys will be opening a satellite office in Jonesboro this week and can be reached to discuss your project by calling our toll-free number: 1-888-276-0848 or by emailing: jonesboro@pleth.com. Stay tuned to the Pleth corporate website for some press releases regarding all of this in the very near future, but I wanted to at least make mention of this before I headed out on Vacation. These are very exciting times…
Project: Fayetteville Shale
I recently launched a new website for the Fayetteville Shale Scholarship Fund. I have actually had this project open for a while now awaiting content. I think the end product turned out very well. I used Woo Themes as the foundation for this project and it fit very well into my design for them.
In the very near future visitors to this website will have the ability to register for annual fishing and golf tournaments held by the Fayetteville Shale Scholarship Fund. Stay tuned for details when that functionality is integrated.
Projects: Lyon College
While I have been busy lately working on a project for the University of Central Arkansas here in Conway, our Batesville team has been hard at work on a project for Lyon College. There will be a full press release on the Pleth corporate site soon on the Lyon project but basically it consisted of moving their website into the MODX content management system and to add some additional functionality and usability functionality to the website. I think the end result turned out very well…
Again, stay tuned to our corporate website for additional information regarding this project.
Pleth to Sponsor AHEWC
My partner Stephen is going to be posting a full press release on the Pleth corporate site about this soon but I wanted to also make mention of the fact that Pleth will be sponsoring the Arkansas Higher Education Web Conference this year. The Arkansas Higher Education Web Conference, or AHEWC, is the brainchild of Chris Nixon, Tonya Oaks Smith, and Shelley Keith.
Having worked with several universities from around the state, my partners and I all agreed that we really wanted to be involved with this conference. We feel that the knowledge sharing and networking between professionals at the higher ed level in our state will benefit our entire region and look forward to hearing great things from this conference. Stay tuned for a link back to our full press release on this exciting event. For more information about AHEWC, please visit: http://ahewc.org.
EP:002 – The Cotton Club Podcast
I am still continuing to get my audio settings tweaked for these shows so please bear with me on this, hopefully in the next few episodes I can get this all ironed out. I wanted to release another edition of The Cotton Club this week before heading out of town so I asked my good friend Bill Wheeler of SWScripts to be on the show, Bill is also @swscripts on Twitter.
Some of the topics that Bill and I discussed on this weeks show include:
- On-Air Bids (PHP based software application written by Bill and used by radio stations and media outlets to manage live auctions).
- MODx CMS / PHP Framework
- Pleth’s new entry-level CMS solution for Non-Profits, Churches.
- PHP IDE’s / Programming Environments
- Iphone Applications (Active Sonar, Waze, and News Stand)
Advantages to Outsourcing Business Class Email
This past weekend my business partners and I went away on our annual corporate retreat to discuss our existing business model and to evaluate each of our products and services. We each agreed that our most popular solution is one that we don’t spend a lot of time promoting, our premium email solution. There are several advantages to businesses that chose to outsource their email to us, in this post I plan to cover a few of these bullet points.
I am also including a presentation that I put together regarding our solution, click on the play button below to start the presentation. If you would like to learn more about business class email solutions, please feel free to drop me a note and I will be glad to schedule a time w/ you to discuss your needs in more detail…
- You Get Our Team of Experts - When you turn to a hosted solution, it’s as though you suddenly have an entire staff of experts working for you—serving as an extension of your IT department and allowing your in-house team to focus on the other critical aspects of your infrastructure.
- Our Cutting Edge Technology - Since hosted solutions, like ours, focus on their specific area of expertise, we can stay on top of the latest advances in their industry. We also have the resources to implement and maintain a variety of technologies.
- Reliable Access - We guarantee 100% satisfaction. If you’re not satisfied, we’re not satisfied. This is why we won’t force you into long-term contracts. If we fail you, we’ll give you your money back and help you take your business elsewhere.
- No Setup or Maintenance Concerns - When you turn to a hosted solution like ours, you immediately have a fully equipped, top-of-the-line system that will be continually updated and maintained. This saves you thousands of dollars in server hardware, software, upgrades, and the expertise to run it all.
- Reduced Costs - You can take these system deployment and maintenance expenses out of the budget. You will always benefit from the latest in hardware and software technology, managed by experienced engineers, with no additional costs and no unexpected fees.
- Scalability - When your company grows, your infrastructure must also grow even faster. Since hosting providers, like Pleth, have extensive hardware and software resources, we can scale smoothly and easily. Cloud hosting, in particular, is especially designed for scalability—since you use only the infrastructure resources you need.
- Scalability: Cloud Computing Advantage - We’re always ready for your growth. Thanks to the elastic nature of cloud computing, we can automatically add hardware and adjust settings from the cloud so that you don’t miss a beat—and you only pay for what you need, and nothing you don’t.
- Automatic Backups & Data Recovery – As Hosting Providers we know that you have entrusted us with your invaluable data—so we design their systems to protect that data. We have the resources to implement exhaustive backup and data recovery systems. We back up your data every night, in multiple geographic locations, in our top-tier data centers. And if a user accidentally deletes an email or email folder, you can restore it easily through our control panel at no cost—even up to 14 days after the data was deleted.
- Storage & Transmission Security - Businesses can spend thousands of dollars to protect their data—or they can save thousands by turning to a hosted system like ours. We integrate extensive security measures to protect your data from physical threats—such as theft, overheating, power outages, and fire—as well as technical threats from hackers or prying eyes. Our data centers are designed to protect your data from all physical and technical threats. And to secure your data during its journey through cyberspace, our system uses DoD standards-based protocols, as well as extended SSL encryption, and we meet all PCI DSS data security requirements for information security.
- Automatic Software Upgrades - When you choose hosted apps like ours, you don’t need to worry about downloading and installing software upgrades or security patches. Your system will always be up-to-date. We stay on top of upgrades and security patches around the clock, so you’ll always be using the latest versions of all system software. And we partner with leaders in the security industry, to give you the strongest level of protection available.
- Data Access - With hosted apps like ours, you benefit from having a wide range of data access options. This flexibility helps your employees to be more productive, compared to employees who are limited to using only a specific computer or specific software. Location is no longer an issue. You can access and manage data from any Internet-connected computer or mobile device. And your data transmissions are secured, to avoid any possibility of data leakage.
- Federal Regulations & Compliance – We stay on top of the regulations so you don’t have to. We provide the storage, compliance, and retrieval features needed for audits, legal requests, and other business needs. Our optional archiving service is designed to meet e-discovery, regulatory, and industry guidelines for data retention, and is ideal even for companies that need to adhere to the highest levels of compliance.
New Plethware Email Password Security Measures
To ensure that all of our users have the best security possible, we are changing the password requirements for our business class email solutions from Pleth. While we are not forcing everyone to update their passwords immediately, we are encouraging our users to update their passwords for better security. If you’d like to change your credentials now you can, simply login to www.plethware.com, click settings, click change password…
As of September 26th, 2009, all of our users will be held to the following standards when changing their passwords: (Passwords cannot contain:)
- Less than 6 characters.
- 3 or more consecutive numerals (e.g. 567, 9876).
- The word "password".
- The mailbox user name.
- The mailbox domain name.
- ————————————————————–
- If you are still managing your email in-house and fighting the battle day to day, and all of the frustrations that go along with managing email, users, security, etc., take a look at our email outsourcing solutions…
Focusing on MODx Hosting Solutions
I recently did a blog post for our corporate website about our MODx hosting solutions. As I have said in the past, we aren’t your typical hosting company, we very easily could be though given our advanced infrastructure, but for us that’s just not where our heart is. We tend to take more of a developmental approach to hosting, this is probably because we are developers first and foremost. The fact that we don’t spend as much time promoting our hosting solutions as we do our development services could probably be viewed as an injustice to those that are familiar with our infrastructure.
When it comes to our hosting solutions, the fact is that we probably have one of the most secure infrastructures on the market, with possibly the most value added services you will find anywhere else. We also rank very high when it comes to bandwidth and our storage rates are quite comparable to those offered on a national level. We can even provide developers and small agencies that are not interested in managing their own hosting infrastructure a viable and affordable alternative with our VPS (virtual private server) solutions.
Even though we don’t typically pursue hosting clients, we will occasionally notice a segment of the landscape that we would really like to reach, one of those segments is the MODx developer community. Here’s an excerpt from the post I did on MODx hosting solutions that we provide. (you can read the entire post here…) Given the fact that we know the software relatively well, possibly better than a lot of the larger, bargain basement providers out there, we feel as if we can do a better job hosting it for our clients.
One service that we have gotten very good at over time is hosting particular software, primarily Wordpress and MODx. My partner Greg and I almost work exclusively with these two products and we know the inner workings of these applications and can pretty much troubleshoot any problems that may arise with little cause for concern. Also, Matt Critcher has devoted a lot of time toward securing these applications and making sure that they run at optimal performance. In the case of wordpress, there are a lot of hosting providers out there that can provide one click wordpress installations through their control panels (us included), but with MODx, there aren’t a lot of hosting providers out there that have worked with MODx in comparison to some other CMS solutions that are out there such as Joomla or Drupal. This sort of is a good thing for us, it gives us an advantage over a vast majority of the hosting companies out there because we already have a good working knowledge of the software, and can provide straight to the point support on any issues our clients should have running the software. In fact, this site runs on MODx.
With this in mind, my partners and I are going to focus a lot of our attention toward the niche MODx managed hosting crowd that just wants to deploy their website from a developmental and management perspective and not have to be bothered with the actual hosting itself. We can provide one of the best hosting environments on the planet for MODx CMS as well as some of the most knowledgeable technical support for the software you will find. Again, we know this because we also deploy MODx solutions for our clients and manage them on a daily basis.
If you are interested in discussing your MODx hosting needs, please don’t hesitate to contact us and we will be glad to provide you with a free quote for managed or dedicated hosting.
If you have a need for MODx hosting, whether it’s 1 or 300 installations, please don’t hesitate to contact us if you think we can be of any assistance. We enjoy speaking with other developers who utilize this platform.
Current Projects: Xtreme Green Lawn Service
I was contacted a week or so ago on Facebook by Xtreme-Green Lawn Service about redesigning their website. I have known the owners of Xtreme Green for a long time and have worked on other projects for them over the years. The goal of this project was to take their website and to make it look more professional and to increase their rate of conversion on the website from visitors to actual customers. Xtreme Green operates in the Dallas / Fort Worth area so they have a pretty big focus area, as well as a lot of competitors from both a local and national level.
Content management is an important requirement for this project, they need the ability to post updates easily as well as publish content about their service offerings and specials. With this in mind I started the project with wordpress version 2.8 and have used woo theme as the basis for the design. The client is out of town on vacation this week so I don’t have a preview link for this project yet but I can share a screenshot of where I am at so far…

Current Projects: Judge Karen Baker
I was contacted by Judge Karen Baker a short time ago. She’s planning her campaign for Arkansas Supreme Court. She was needing a website for her campaign so I provided her with a quote. Once I got the go ahead from her I got started. Naturally, content management is one of the projects requirements so I have started with wordpress 2.8 on the backend. I was also telling her during our talks that establishing a political figures page on Facebook and an account on Twitter for the campaign would go a long way toward giving her campaign some exposure so I have created those for her as well. The project isn’t complete yet, we are still waiting on some content but for the most part I have nailed down the design elements.
I have been using Brian Gardner’s studiopress themes for a while now as a starter them for the vast majority of my wordpress designs but about a month or so ago I decided to checkout woo themes after a few developers recommended them to me. This project is built upon a woo theme that I have modified. It’s coming along pretty well so far. I don’t have a launch date for the project to share at this time but here’s a screengrab of what we have so far…






