To get around this issue here is what you can do.

1. SSH into your server
2. Type at the command prompt:

   nano /var/www/vhosts/yourdomain.com/etc/php.ini

3. In this php.ini file for the particular vhost find

   post_max_size = xM 

   &

   upload_max_filesize = xM

4. If either of above parameters are not there, add to the php.ini file.
5. 10M means 10mb upload limit so what I did was change both to 10M

   post_max_size = 10M 

   upload_max_filesize = 10M

6. Save and exit the file by pressing CTRL – X, typing Y (to overwrite changes), and hit enter.
7. Restart your server@ the command line by typing:

   /etc/init.d/httpd restart

8. Now you should see your upload limit change in WordPress.

If you are getting a blank php.ini file when trying the above, try adding this line of code into a WordPress template to find out what location your site is pulling its php.ini preferences from:

<?php phpinfo(); ?>

* Please keep in mind that not all servers have the same software versions and therefore setting PHP values can be different.

PA Web Design Company Otreva Designs launches two new responsive websites in first quarter 2012 with one more launching in April

Scranton, Pennsylvania (PRWEB) April 11, 2012

Otreva Designs, a Pennsylvania website design company, launched two responsive websites in the first quarter of 2012 helping clients reach visitors on all types of devices including smartphones and tablets. The first website was for the Pennsylvania car accident lawyers of Dougherty, Leventhal and Price. The second was for Vitamin Partners, an onlinehealth supplement store that specializes in healthcare practitioner brands of popular supplements.

Otreva Designs specializes in designing responsive websites that automatically adjust to a device’s width. Responsive web designs adapt automatically to the device’s width they are being displayed on using CSS3 media queries. A smartphone screen is normally around only 320 pixels wide while a desktop screen can be 1440 pixels or more. At over 4.5x the size of a normal smartphone, the desktop screen can support much more content than a smartphone. However with a responsive web design, designers can plan for these differences in size and display the content based on need. This eliminates excessive resizing, panning and scrolling as well as accidental clicks on incorrect web page links when using a smartphone. “Responsive web design is a great solution for many websites owners who want to ensure their visitors have a great experience no matter what device they’re using,” says lead responsive designer Mike Averto. “However it isn’t a complete replacement for a mobile application. Until frameworks like Sencha Touch can compete with all the native features of devices like smartphones, native mobile applications cannot be completely replaced.”

35% of all American adults have a smartphone and some 87% of these owners have access to the internet from their device according to Pew Internet. When asked what device these adults normally use to access the internet, 25% of the smartphone owners said that they mostly go online using their phone, rather than with a computer.

About Otreva Designs
Otreva Designs is a Scranton, Pennsylvania based web marketing company focused on creating web products that help website owners reach their online potential. Creating a website is only a small part of internet marketing. Otreva Designs also offers custom application development, Search Engine Optimization, PPC Management and Social Media Marketing services for its customers. For more information on Otreva Designs & its PA Web Designservices, please visit http://www.otreva.com or call 888.570.8166

Scranton, PA (PRWEB) April 03, 2012

Online health supplement store, Vitamin Partners, launched a new platform in early 2012 and offers nearly 13,000 vitamins & health supplements from major healthcare practitioner brands. The e-commerce platform was created to adapt to the variety of screen sizes available today from smartphones like the iPhone to tablets and up to laptops and large desktops monitors. VitaminPartners.com is the first e-commerce site in the health supplement industry to offer a responsive web design to customers.

VitaminPartners.com currently offers free shipping on all orders in the US with free returns and is one of the few online platforms to offer international shipping to customers no matter where they are. VitaminPartners.com provides high quality supplements from the world’s leading healthcare practitioner brands such as Douglas Laboratories, Genestra Brands, Metagenics, Seroyal, and Unda. The online vitamin store only sells authentic products guaranteed by the manufacturer so customers know they can rely on what they are putting in their bodies.

The VitaminPartners.com website is powered by a responsive web design created by Pennsylvania Web Design Company, Otreva Designs. The goal of the new platform is to provide a custom yet consistent experience across smartphones, tablets, and laptops. A responsive web design automatically adjusts to fit content to the width of the device’s screen. For smartphone users, this means no more pinching to zoom and accidental clicks on the wrong link because the website is too small and hard to see. Desktop users who are using CSS3 & HTML5 compliant browsers will also benefit as they don’t have to keep their browser window maximized to avoid scrolling horizontally. They can make the windows wider and thinner to see the full effect of a responsive web design.

About Dr. Jason
Nestled in the heart of Northeast Pennsylvania is the private chiropractic practice of Dr. Jason DePietropaolo. Dr. Jason, as he is called by his patients, routinely recommends nutritional supplements to his patients but noticed there wasn’t a reliable place for these patients to acquire the high quality supplements that he knew they needed. Many patients were buying lower quality nutritional products and then not getting their desired results. “Patients were buying store brands or imitation products for the same price as trusted healthcare practitioner brands,” says DePietropaolo. “I knew creating an online store that offered these brands would help my patients as well as other consumers.” This is what led Dr. Jason to start the health supplement website.

We created a new product data schema for over 12,500 products that the store offers and helped the client get it setup in the hosted backend. The next step was to somehow connect this data to Google so our products would easily display at the top of results for Google searches. In only the first few months, the store is boasting a 4 digit percentage increase in sales. Visit VitaminPartners.com for all your vitamin and health supplement needs.

Pros:

• Super easy setup
• Quick and easy order management
• Most major payment methods supported (Not Amazon Payments)
• Liquid templates make it easy to create custom dynamic e-commerce websites
• Supports mobile commerce so customers can purchase while on the go

Cons:

• Slow, sometimes completely unanswered support questions. I have at least 3-4 tickets open for more than a week without any response or answer.
• Not setup for 1,000s of products although you can do it. With nearly 13,000 products in the store I created, I found it difficult to organize and display this many products. For example, you cannot create vendor pages inside Shopify.
• Google Product Search doesn’t work well for 1,000s of SKUs. If you want to be Google Merchant compliant, you need to manually enter the UPC or MPN. Unfortunately every one of my SKUs = MPN however there is no way to get Shopify to automatically pick this up. I have to manage my own completely separate Google Merchant feed and had to create a liquid template in Shopify to pull my data from.

Knowing what I know now, would I have used Shopify?

Probably not for a store this large. Due to some limitations and my poor experience with their customer support I would have used a solution like Magento community or MagentoGO. I believe most of my unanswered tickets were due to the fact that Shopify doesn’t currently support what I was looking to do. Even so, they should have at least responded to say this. On the other hand for a simple store selling maybe 10-20 products like T-shirts, I think this is the platform for you. I love the liquid template design model and have had minimal problems developing for the front-end of the store other than when a variable wasn’t available like a vendor page as mentioned above.

My answer

Well it depends. There is no doubt that phone book advertising is a diminishing marketing medium however I think there may be value for certain industries.

For a local NEPA restaurant business, I would suggest completely dropping the phone book and focusing your time & budget to get your menu online. I can’t tell you how annoying it is to want to place an order with a particular restaurant and not being able to find what is on their menu or let alone their phone number. Keeping a small ad under “Italian restaurant” is fine but the half page ads with your menu aren’t really necessary anymore. I would expect restaurants that do a high volume of take-out business could increase the number of take-out orders by simply posting a menu. As long as you have some minimal internet experience, go to services like Google Places or Yelp and claim/create your listing. Add some information and encourage your customers to add ratings.

Even better for a small local business like a restaurant can be social media marketing. It can be a tough medium to master but as long as you realize you are trying to have a conversation and not push advertising on your potential clients, social media marketing can be a great avenue for a local businesses to stay in touch with customers.

Now on the other hand for a contractor, I would suggest keeping at least a small ad in the phone book. I wouldn’t recommend growing your phone book presence and definitely don’t ignore online marketing completely. As with investing, diversity is key. Having all your eggs in one basket is never smart and the same concept applies to marketing. Having a larger plan with certain parts dedicated to different avenues will provide the best ROI.

In my opinion the biggest determination for my answer to this question is, who is your target market? Is your dream client likely to carry an iPhone in their pocket and use Google search to find your business? Or is it more likely that your perfect customer will use an old flip phone and wonder, what is local internet search? Chances are that you are not that lucky and your target market is somewhere in between. Maybe you haven’t even thought of who your dream customer is, which in that case, you should take a step back and do some market research first. Then come back and look through this post and think about what makes sense.

For me as a web designer in Scranton, PA, the answer to this question is a little easier. I know my customers are familiar with the web and search engines so I focus much of my marketing efforts online. However, that isn’t the only place I focus on for my marketing efforts. I actually dedicate more than 50% of my marketing efforts offline through local networking and being a part of local business groups. This brings in many more leads than online efforts alone.

Conclusion

I think phone book advertising options offer some value to certain industries and target demographics but I think it is losing ground every day. I know I put mine in the recycling bin as soon as it comes and I predict more and more people will be doing that into the future. With more devices hitting the market that have dedicated internet and mobile services becoming better, focusing more efforts towards online mediums is important.

I recently moved my hosting to a VPS and I run all my PHP sites in Fast_CGI Mode for the performance benefits. When running PHP as a FastCGI process, each domain has its own php.ini which is located at “/var/www/vhosts/yourdomainhere.com/etc/php.ini”, instead of the normal location of just /etc/php.ini. Making changes to just /etc/php.ini will not do anything when running as FastCGI.

Unfortunately having a couple domains on my server already, I had to go through each path to make some changes to the php.ini file to add some security. I used a great tool put out by the PHP Security Consortium called: PHPSecInfo. It provides an equivalent to the phpinfo() function but reports security information about the PHP environment, and offers suggestions for improvement. It is as easy as uploading the files to your webserver and navigating to the folder. (Instructions below.)

Why use PHPSecInfo to secure your server?

There are many ways to see information about your server that you’d probably rather keep private. If you are reading this and running WordPress on a VPS or Dedicated server, scan your domain here: Sucuri SiteCheck

Hopefully you don’t find anything bad but a few sites (some well known) I entered as tests came back to me showing their full internal paths. I’m not a huge fan of security through obscurity as a primary security strategy but PHP is very good in leaking the internal paths of your system in case of errors. You can find out exactly where the blog is hosted (/var/www, /home/user, etc) and you can 99% of the time guess the admin user used for administration solving half of the riddle to accessing your server administration section.

How to fix this specific error:

Open your php.ini file (generally at /etc/php.ini however for the scope of this article read above again for location if you are running PHP as a FastCGI process) and set:

display_errors = Off

How to use PHPSecInfo to secure your server

1. Download PHPSecInfo
2. Extract the files and folders from the zip file you just downloaded.
3. Rename the extracted folder to phpsecinfo.
4. Upload the renamed folder to the root directory for your domain using SFTP/FTP.
5. Now, simply open your browser and browse to http://yourdomainwhereyouuploaded.com/phpsecinfo.

How to make a php.ini template for new domains you create

(Consider this was written for Plesk)

1. SSH into your server as root

cd /var/www/vhosts/.skel/0/

ls -al

If you don’t see a conf directory after listing files, make one:

mkdir conf

Otherwise:

cd /etc

cp php.ini /var/www/vhosts/.skel/0/conf

 nano /var/www/vhosts/.skel/0/conf/php.ini

Now make any changes to this php.ini file and any new domains you add will use this as a template.

Now what about current domains I have?

Unfortunately there is no shortcut to editing your current domains. You’ll have to access their php.ini’s one by one and add any changes you want. I would at least suggest adding these 3:

display_errors = 'Off'
allow_url_fopen = 'Off'
expose_php = 'Off'

Again, you can access this on a per domain basis here:
/var/www/vhosts/yourdomainhere.com/etc/php.ini
Note: This will look different that the php.ini file you copied from /etc/php.ini but you can add individual settings like the 3 above.

To supplement the SEO efforts, a new, clean responsive design ensures that anyone viewing the site has a consistent user experience. With a fluid design, the site works with a variety of current screen sizes like smartphones and tablets yet will also work with screen sizes that emerge into the future.

I ended up not finding many answers for this but decided to check my video card drivers. I was running a Nvidia Geforce GTX570 with 285.62. I decided to give the beta drivers a try; currently 295.51 as of this writing. That ended up fixing it.

I guess there was a bug with 285.62 for Windows Media Center and it must have also fallen under WLMM. Anyway simple fix after an hour of research. Hope this can help someone else out.

I have a good example from an actual client I was working with. A few weeks ago we compared their website against a few local competitors in the industry. One specific local competitor was ranking very well for a trophy phrase with “Pennsylvania” in it which is great for them. Or is it? This site was for sure getting many more views as there are many more viewers in Pennsylvania as a whole than just specific parts of Pennsylvania. However, was a visitor searching with the term Pennsylvania who was from the other side of the state more likely to convert than a visitor who is just miles away from the business searching with a local SEO term? No.

Without getting too specific, it was a local service business who was more likely to convert a visitor who could see an employee face to face or at least know they were only a few miles away, not on the other side of the state. When I researched some local SEO key phrases without the state name, I noticed there was almost no competition. I added some cities, counties, and other local terms into my SEO of their site and what do you know, within only a few weeks we have top 3 results for almost all of the local phrases. After analyzing some Google Analytics reports we noticed that many of these phrases even began converting in that short period of time. Visitors were searching for these local terms and actually finding what they wanted.

My point in all of this is that instead of focusing all of our time on that one trophy keyphrase, do some exploratory research into some other easily converting options. When it comes down to it, does ranking really matter for that trophy phrase? Or is the number of conversions on the site more important?