Once the FIAGallery is installed, adding photos and images is very easy.
NOTE: To add the FIAGallery, please refer to WordPress.org for Grand FIAGallery

• Go to the DASHBOARD and under FIA Gallery on the left hand side, click on MANAGE GALLERIES 
• From this page, you can CREATE A GALLERY or UPLOAD IMAGES

• UPLOAD IMAGES by clicking on the middle tab. BROWSE to locate the images/photos you would like to use, choose the GALLERY you would like to add them to and then click UPLOAD IMAGES at the bottom. Any TITLE or DESCRIPTION that has been added will transfer over into the gallery.

For more information on the Grand FIAGallery, read the Reviews, Tutorials and FAQ

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If you’ve ever thought about web design or development as a part-time or full-time career, there’s a great class starting soon!

We are always looking for good people to add to our team at CyberInnovation!

Christina Hills has been teaching the Website Creation Workshop for many years and she’s helped hundreds of people, who had little or no web design background, how to build a website from scratch!

Registration is now open for the Website Creation Workshop
with Christina Hills.

Christina is a master at teaching non-techie entrepreneurs like you,
how to build your website with WordPress.

Go here, get all the details, and register right now…

http://websitecreationworkshop.com/a/?af=1021519&p=register

On that page you’ll see the details about how you can gain:

• confidence;
• freedom; and
• independence

to easily create your own website yourself and stop having to wait
on webmasters for even the simplest of changes.

Christina has taught hundreds of people to do it! And as you saw in my
previous emails to you, she has fun in the process.

And she wants to coach you too, so you can build your website yourself,
anytime, any day!

http://websitecreationworkshop.com/a/?af=1021519&p=register

If you have any questions let me know,

Bob Randklev

P.S. She has an awesome guarantee, go check it out here:

http://websitecreationworkshop.com/a/?af=1021519&p=register

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http://fpcmarion.org

First Presbyterian Church in Marion, IA has been established for over 17o years. Rev. Dr. Howards Chapman has been the pastor since 1994. Rev. Beth Hilkerbaumer joined as associate pastor in 2011 and Rev. Dr. Nancy J. Redman joined as parish associate in 2010

First Presbyterian Church houses The Churches of Marion Pantry, begun in 1982 and operated by nine local churches to make food available to needy families, and the Helping Hands Storeroom, operated by volunteers from our church for more than 30 years. The Storeroom provides donated clothing, bedding, household items, and toys to individuals and families in need.

INTERNALLY NURTURING, EXTERNALLY SERVING
Within our walls, we strive to nurture and encourage one another in the love of Jesus Christ.  Out in the community we strive to serve others and in so doing serve Christ.

Website Development Overview:

We started the WordPress development with the theme, Americana Mojave  from iThemes.

Next was features and plugins. We added the Bible Verse Display plugin in by Elise Bosse. Bible Verse Display allows the user to add a bible verse as a widget, in a post, or on a page. The verse can be Biblegateway’s Verse of the Day, or one randomly chosen from any favorite verses. Many versions/languages are available.

We also added Mark Barnes’ Sermon Browser which allows churches to upload sermons to their WordPress website, where they can be searched, listened to, watched, read, downloaded and podcasted.

Other plugins:

We also added Google XML Sitemaps, Connections, and of course BackupBuddy to consistently get backups of the database AND content in case something would happen!

Closing:

If your group or organization is looking for an affordable website solution we can help. We create the site to fit your needs then you can maintain page updates and changes. Contact us as needed to add more functionality and features!

We can host your WordPress website and we offer plugin, database and SEO maintenance for WordPress.

Contact us today for more information on how we can help with your web development, design integrated with social networking and web hosting!

Of course to learn more about http://fpcmarion.org,  just visit their website!

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NextGEN Gallery is one of the most popular WordPress gallery plugin, and one of the most popular WordPress plugins of any kind, with over 6 million downloads.

NextGEN Galleries offers a very easy to use functionality for getting images from your desktop to your website. You can upload batches of images via a standard WordPress uploader, or upload images via zip file or FTP.

To add a new gallery:

Log into the DASHBOARD -> GALLERY -> ADD GALLERY/IMAGES. Click on ADD NEW GALLERY, name the gallery, click ADD GALLERY.

To add photos to a gallery:

Once logged into the DASHBOARD -> ADD GALLERY/IMAGES -> at the UPLOAD IMAGE screen, click on SELECT FILES, choose as many images as you would like, at the drop down menu, choose the gallery you would like to add them to, click UPLOAD IMAGES.

To edit a gallery:

You can view all galleries at the MANAGE GALLERY option. You can hover over the gallery name and make edits such as adding more photos or removing. From this screen you can also SORT GALLERY if you would like them in a particular order.

To add a gallery to a page/post:

In order to post the photo gallery to a page, locate the PAGE, place your cursor where you would like the pictures to be and use this code ie, [Gallery not found] with the correct gallery ID in where the X is. Update this information and the photo gallery should appear on the public site with the option to view the thumbnails or view as a slide show. Gallery ID numbers are located in the MANAGE GALLERY option in the first column.

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http://seiasynod.org

Southeast Iowa Synod, Evangelical Lutheran Church of America(ELCA) is one of the 65 synods in the United States.  Serving parishes in southeast Iowa, Northern Missouri and southwest Illinois.

God’s Work. Our Hands.

Website Development Overview:

We started the WordPress development with the theme, Acute Blue, from iThemes.

Some of the features and plugins we added are Connections, a simple to use directory manager which we used to create the staff and synod directories. We also used Gravity Forms, which we believe is the best contact forms plugin for WordPress and Events Calendar Pro which is a snap to use and keeps all scheduled events easily accessible to the public.

Other plugins:

We also added Google Maps for easy directions and of course BackupBuddy to consistently get backups of the database AND content in case something would happen!

Closing:

If your group or organization is looking for an affordable website solution we can help. We create the site to fit your needs then you can maintain page updates and changes. Contact us as needed to add more functionality and features!

We can host your WordPress website and we offer plugin, database and SEO maintenance for WordPress.

Contact us today for more information on how we can help with your web development, design integrated with social networking and web hosting!

Of course to learn more about SE Iowa Synod,  just visit their website, http://seiasynod.org!

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I posted today on my personal blog about an upcoming training class you won’t want to miss!

http://bobrandklev.com/news/spring-website-design-and-development-classes-starting-soon/

Christina Hills teaches the Website Creation Workshop twice a year in the spring and fall. In 2011 she’s only offering the class in the spring as she has other commitments this fall!

I took this class in 2008 and highly recommend it!

Many of our designers/developers have also taken her class. I know of people who have made career changes by taking these classes and becoming a full time website services company!

To learn more just visit the registration page. There are videos, links and more information but don’t delay! Registration is open until March 16 and classes start March 21st! Click here to learn more: http://Cyberinnovation.com/WebSiteWorkshop

Christina has taught hundreds of people worldwide how to easily build websites by themselves.

You can build virtually any kind of website you want. A church website, a youth website, a mission website?

This is an instructor led class, with 8 modules over 10 weeks. Each class has an assignment, lecture and demo/training website. You can collaborate with other students as well as alumni members. It’s a very easy to learn and each module has a handout to follow as it’s designed for non-techie people, with explanations in plain English!

ADDITIONAL CLASS HIGHLIGHTS:

• Create church and other non-profit or business websites
• Newsletter/email solutions to reduce your office and postage cost
• Membership sites to create private “members only” websites
• Photo galleries to show off your church and special events
• Static page websites and blogging websites
• Social Networking Integration to connect with youth and young adults

You can literally learn how to build a website in as little as 10 weeks but don’t wait as there is only one class in 2011.

Remember registration is open until March 16 and classes start March 21st!
Learn more at: http://Cyberinnovation.com/WebSiteWorkshop

If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact us!

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For some this may sound like a silly question, for others it’s a wake up call!

Today it’s pretty common for business owners to back up their servers and computers. More and more computers at home are being backed up but it’s rare that we see new clients who have a complete backup of their website. If you own a laptop you need an online backup like Carbonite or Mozy!

The best solutions for WordPress Website backups is BackupBuddy from iThemes.

Although this isn’t a free plugin ($45 for personal, $75 for business) it’s priceless if you have a problem!

I’m afraid people “over trust” their web hosting and I’m not talking about their company going out of business, rather their site getting hacked or what seems like a simple theme or plugin or WordPress upgrade that crashes their site. I don’t think you have to worry so much about losing your site data if you use a major host like Hostgator or Bluehost.

If you use a friends server or some other rogue setup I can’t stress backup any more!

To purchase BackupBuddy follow our link here: http://CyberInnovation.com/BackupBuddy

Installation and Configuration

BackupBuddy is easy to install, with only a few options to configure and you can schedule regular database or full content/database backups.

After you install BackupBuddy you’ll need to enter your supplied license key or login with your username/password you created when you purchased the plugin

Next find the BackupBuddy tab in the left column of WordPress and start at the “Settings” tab.

The first section of settings are the notifications. Here you setup an email address to receive notifications on successful or un-successful backups.

Next is the FTP settings where you can have your backup files uploaded off site! Don’t have a FTP site you can use? Simply get a secondary web hosting account with Hostgator or Bluehost and setup BackupBuddy to store your backups on the secondary web hosting site!

Next is Amazon S3. We won’t go into detail here but if you prefer to store you backups on Amazon S3 prices are much more reasonable and if you have multiple sites this may be a better solution than FTP. This is an API connection which has fewer issues than FTP username/passwords can have

Miscellaneous Settings: IMPORTANT!

Maximum number of archive backups is likely one of the MOST IMPORTANT settings in BackupBuddy. If you have unlimited storage this isn’t a problem but many hosting accounts are limited so too many backups can fill up your empty space and shut down your website!

It varies site by site but we generally set this to 10 backups TOTAL. We generally run a full backup weekly or monthly and database only backups daily or weekly.

Database backups are very small and not a problem. Most full backups are also small but we do have some clients with large amounts of video/audio and PDF files. These can create very large backups and although BackupBuddy excludes backup up the backup archive files, 10 files at 500mb each can add up quickly!

Set your limit and monitor you have enough backups at anytime!

There are additional settings to exclude certain folders or secondary sites you may have installed on the site for testing purposes.

Scheduling

The next tab/page in the sidebar under BackupBuddy is “Scheduling.” Here we generally setup two schedules: One for a database only backup and one for a full database/content backup. You can set them individually for daily, weekly, bi-weekly and monthly. More options may come in the future but this is pretty comprehensive for backup scheduling.

Backups

The last option in the left tab for BackupBuddy is “Backups” which is why we are here! Simply click the Full Backup or Database backup and wait.. don’t refresh your browser and your backup will run!

A list of your backup archives are displayed and again look at your settings page to limit the number of archive files.

ImportBuddy.php

IF you are forced to restore your website from a full backup OR you need to move your WordPress website to a new hosting company you can do it very easily with BackupBuddy. I say “easy” compared to how we had to do it in the past!

Before BackupBuddy we used a plugin to back up the database but used FTP to move the files to the new host. We had to manually create a MySQL Database and import the DB backup then go into the tables and manually change settings to match the new host.

With BackupBuddy you will need to create a database on your web host in cPanel or your web hosting dashboard. After that you simply upload your BackupBuddy zipped copy of your website which you downloaded or stored on a FTP server or Amazon S3 from our settings above.

Next you download a copy of the ImportBuddy.php and also upload that do your new server under the HTML or Public HTML folder of your website. Once the backup zip file and importbuddy files are in your web server folder simply type in your domain name and the link to the import file. Here’s an example “yourdomainname.com/importbuddy.php”

You will be prompted with a few questions, your database username/password, name of database and then the restore process starts.

Success!

You’ll be amazed at the speed and success of the restored WordPress site. As with any backup system there may be some rogue or unique changes you need to make but generally they aren’t an issue with BackupBuddy rather a oversite. If we move a website from one domain to another, any internal links embedded in pages won’t change. There are plugins out there like Velvet Blues that will find your old URL’s and change them to your new domain name.

Summary

Although this is a very detailed description of BackupBuddy it’s not a complete tutorial. If you need assistance or help installing configuring or restoring with BackupBuddy, we are here to help.

To purchase BackupBuddy simply follow our link: http://CyberInnovation.com/BackupBuddy

If you have any comments or questions please let us know, we are happy to help!

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More and more we are getting requests from our clients asking how they can add polls to their website.

If you want to give your visitors the ability to vote on your content, ask a question or get their feedback, you can do this with polls.

Below are more details and reading, if you prefer to watch a video instead click here:

Click here to view the embedded video.

There are a number of WordPress plugins but we prefer to use a couple:

WP-Polls

PollDaddy.com

WP-Polls is one of the most popular plugins in the WordPress directory.

Simply install the plugin, scroll down to the bottom left side of your dashboard and you’ll see a menu item called “Polls” (with a bar graph)

Here you can add a Poll or question you want to ask. Then add the answers you want people to vote on and click save. It’s that easy!

Now in your Post or Page editor you can look for this icon and simply enter the poll id from your “manage list of polls”

The shortcode is added automatically to your page to display the poll.

Or you can go to your widgets and drag the WP-Polls widget to your sidebar

WP-Polls Options

You can:

• set numerous options globally or on a per poll basis
• show results immediately or disable results
• allow more than one answer to be chosen or just one
• block repeat voters via cookie, IP or both

Results are available as graphs in the dashboard and much more!

Polldaddy.com is our preferred plugin!

Polldaddy.com is a company owned/manage by Automattic which also manages WordPress.org. I’m not sure you could find a better connection between two service but that being said they are two services.

Like above you add the free Polldaddy.com plugin to WordPress.

Next go to http://PollDaddy.com and create a free account. Now in your Polls>Options enter your username/password to make the plugin connect to your account.

Now honestly creating basic polls is very similar to WP-Polls but you get additional styling CSS options on a per poll basis.

PollDaddy.com plugin has 20 preset styles and the option to choose Wide-Medium-Narrow

Once you have saved the poll you can then hover over “Share-Embed” to get the Shortcode for embedding into pages/posts but many other options for Java Script, Twitter and others!

There is NOT a simple widget to drop the polls into the sidebar. I suspect it would be tough to offer a plugin as you save the width, color, layout in the polls editor for each INDIVIDUAL post. So you simply copy the script above to an html/text widget.

Adding Media to your Polls

If you want to take your polls to the next level and say vote on an image you can do this with Polldaddy.com. You cannot do this from the dashboard but don’t worry.

Go to your PollDaddy.com dashboard and create a new poll. When you type in your questions or answers you have a choice to upload “Media”

Once you have completed creating your poll and setting your options you can now go back to your WordPress Dashboard and go to Polls>edit and then choose “All my Polls”

You will see the polls you create online and get the same shortcode/embed code and your polls can now show media to allow your visitors to vote on!

Summary

In summary polls are pretty simple. You can install either plugin and setup a quick poll. Then add it to a page/post using the supplied shortcode. Both have similar options to expire on a certain date, allow more than one answer, block by cookie/ip and both allow you to customize the templates.

PollDaddy.com is a free service that allows you to do more with your polls. Now you can add media to your polls to allow visitors to vote on image or other media. There are over 20 pre-designed templates and you can choose from narrow-medium-wide size for your polls.

If you have any questions or have an experience with either of these plugins please make a comment here!

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Independent Sports Supply is a Wholesale Distributor in the Shooting and Hunting Industry based in Cedar Rapids, Ia.

This was a newly formed company so our website design strategy wasn’t based on upgrading an existing site. The focus was creating a members only website to help a distributor communicate private wholesale price lists to their dealers.

The next priority was maintaining a public website to attract more business and be a source for dealers nation wide.

We started with the iThemes Patriot Theme as it was very “American” and “Red-White-Blue.” One of our designers Chris created an awesome logo with gun site and more! He then faded the US flag, US Constitution and American Eagle into the header image. The home page rotating images were focused towards the shooting and hunting industry.

Next we had to lock down the blog so the owner could post updates to his dealer network. We’ve used WishList Member and s2Member on many WordPress membership sites but this client had a different request. He wanted to manually approve all members AND because of that we needed to collect more information on dealer registration.

On our registration page we needed name, address, phone so the owner could call and verify the dealers who were applying.

Wishlist Member only collects First-Last Name and email but does allow manual approval. Problem was he needed the phone number to call.

s2Member wouldn’t allow for manual approval but we could have set up a free registration then after the owner called to verify he could move them to a “Dealer” level created in s2Member. Problem here was it allow people to become a “subscriber” so if they were denied he would have to delete them.

So we settled on WP-Members (not to be confused with WP Members no hyphen) as it gave us the ability to collect name, address, phone, email and hold approval till the owner called to verify the dealer. Upon approval the owner simply uncheck a box and the dealer is sent an approval email with a login name/password.

I highly suggest this plugin for manual approval sites and Chad Butler was awesome to work with. We didn’t need to collect payment via Pay Pal or anything like that but I know Chad is working on a new release.

We opted to use MailPress for email subscription management for news and updates. This allows for HTML or text emails to be sent to all members and MailPress syncs with WP users. So when the owner approves the dealer a user account is created in WordPress and automatically added to MailPress for email updates when anything is posted to the blog.

In summary we have a website open to the public for the owner to advertise his business and locate more dealers across the country he can work with.

Next if a dealer applies to be a member the owner calls and verifies the dealer and approves them. Automatically a WP account is created and they are added to the MailPress email database.

Now as the owner updates the blog with the most current price list, products, specials, his dealers ONLY see this information. If anyone not logged in tries to access this information they are blocked.

Finally we added BackupBuddy from iThemes for schedule DB and Full Theme and file backups!

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