Based in Wilmington, Delaware, NEIL (Nuclear Electric Insurance Limited) is a mutual insurance company that provides insurance to all nuclear power plants in the United States and some facilities internationally.

NEIL partnered with Archer to redesign its primary website, nmlneil.com. The site was designed to accommodate NEIL’s diverse member list, making it easier for members to communicate with NEIL and access a large quantity of content. The site’s look and feel was also updated to enhance brand personality and convey an approachable and professional tone.

Archer built the site on the Umbraco platform, which offers an easy-to-use content management system (CMS) that NEIL’s internal teams can utilize to make changes to the site in a very simple and straightforward way. We selected this .NET CMS because of the need to interface with NEIL’s existing proprietary systems.

We reorganized the primary navigation, or “mega navigation”, to accommodate NEIL’s high volume of content and improve accessibility. Now NEIL members can easily report events and locate important information like evaluation reports, financials, and historical policy.

I’m talking about the simple act of favoriting a user’s tweet. Yes, that little click of the star on Twitter.com or through an app is more powerful than you may think.

Done right, social media marketing should provide brands with opportunities to connect with users on a 1-to-1 basis. Brands constantly monitor their Twitter stream for @mentions and tweets that include their brand or product names. If they see a positive mention from a user, most will @reply to the user or retweet that user’s tweet to all their followers. But is a straight retweet really the right move?

Remember, your followers have already made it clear that they like your brand or are interested in what you have to say. That’s why they decided to follow you in the first place. Is it really worth sending a complimentary tweet from a random user to all of your followers? Sometimes yes, but your followers might not be interested in seeing a brand’s feed filled with ringing endorsements from users they don’t even know. Still, brands keep doing it because it’s a way to publicly recognize a user who said something nice.

This is where favoriting a user’s tweet comes into play. While favoriting a tweet is no doubt a lighter action than retweeting in the hierarchy of social media rewards, it’s a great way to show a user you noticed their tweet and appreciate it. Users still get a notification and will know your brand took the time to read what they tweeted.

Favoriting is also helpful for bookmarking tweets to view later. You can curate tweets and easily show them on a website, on screen at an event, or even on a billboard. Plus, it’s a lot safer than just displaying tweets that contain a certain hashtag, which leaves brands open to spam and inappropriate material.

It’s not always necessary to @reply to a tweet about your brand, and certainly there are many things that aren’t worth retweeting. Think instead of hitting that little gold star and give those users something to smile about when they think of you.

Fast forward 2 days and the Umbraco team are patching again. Following the discovery of the first security hole it appears Umbraco – to their credit – have employed the services of third party security analysts. Targeting all external calls to mydomain/umbraco they have discovered two additional security risks. This time the source code core – umbraco.dll is – is in the mix and further patching is “strongly recommended.” Umbraco have quickly patched most versions of their releases and developers are advised to visit the Umbraco site to ensure they are getting the correct patch for the DLL versions they have in production. If you’ve customized the Umbraco core or are running on one or two older versions (e.g. version 4.7.1) you are likely to have problems and may be faced with immediate upgrading. Such developers are being advised to contact sebastiaan@umbraco.com for advice. The “official” vulnerability information is slated to be released on some yet-to-be-determined date in June.

One additional remediation not immediately obvious on the Umbraco website is the recommendation to IP-restrict access to mydomain/umbraco.

Full details can be found at the following links:

Vulnerability #1: Discovered 4/29/13

http://umbraco.com/follow-us/blog-archive/2013/4/29/security-vulnerability-found-immediate-action-recommended.aspx

Vulnerability #2 # 3: Discovered 5/1/13

http://umbraco.com/follow-us/blog-archive/2013/5/1/security-update-two-major-vulnerabilities-found.aspx

My coworkers are all at once inspiring, entertaining, and the smartest and most knowledgeable people I’ve had the pleasure of knowing. They’ve never hesitated to jump in and explain something when I was confused or share shortcuts and tips that only experience can teach.

I’ve had my fair share of coffee-running, photocopying internships, and Archer has blown that stereotype out of the water. The people I work with understand the value and true purpose of an internship and actively ensure that I am getting the most that I possibly can get out of it. I’ve learned more applicable knowledge in this relatively short period of time than in the last who-knows-how-many years!

I’ve significantly improved my front-end development skills with everything from the latest HTML and CSS practices, processors, and frameworks to JavaScript, PHP, and numerous content management systems. I have also been able to interact with every team, from client services, to UX and strategy, to design, tech, and development, and there is no better way to learn about the process than to be a part of it.

If you’re looking for an internship where you get to work on real projects for impressive clients (seriously, check out the client listing; talk about bragging rights!), Archer is the place for you. If you fancy yourself a foosball star, a PAC-MAN champion, a Nerf gun warrior, or are any good at basketball shootout, bring your best game face because Archer is the place for you.

This has been a truly rewarding experience so far, and I’m sure that within just a few hours of working here you will come to the same conclusion.

Many brands that reach 1 million Fans on Facebook celebrate with a modest gesture to users like a thank you post or video. But we knew Wawa’s exceptionally loyal and passionate fan base deserved something bigger and better. Wawa and Archer launched a month-long Facebook Fan celebration that included giveaways, in-store tie-ins, and even fulfillment of fans’ special requests.

The celebration started on January 28 when Wawa officially passed the 1 millionth fan milestone. In the month that followed, Wawa gave away $5,000 in Wawa gift cards and $5,000 in Wawa merchandise and shared their favorite fan-submitted photos. Then, Wawa put the celebration in the Fans’ hands and asked for their special requests.

During the Million Fan Celebration, more than 3,600 users submitted their requests through a form on Facebook. We saw everything from new product requests, delivery options, location suggestions, and everything in between.

Archer then pored over every request and selected the most popular, interesting, and achievable requests. Together with Wawa, we were able to fulfill 14 requests, which touched over 1,000 Wawa Fans across the globe, from Anchorage, Alaska, to Afghanistan, and of course Wawa’s core Mid-Atlantic region.

Check out some of the Million Fan request posts here:

 In case you haven’t heard, here are some informative articles:

WordPress under attack: How to avoid the coming botnet
WordPress website targeted by hackers

A report from Ars Technica details the threat:

Huge attack on WordPress sites could spawn never-before-seen super botnet

Luckily (or unluckily if you’ve been hit), this is an attack that relies on the fact that WordPress is used by the masses, most of whom don’t exactly study enterprise security. (In fact, the WordPress community should address the issue and start building in security for their platform).

At Archer we recommend a few approaches to mitigate your risk.

First, as WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg suggests, do not use “admin” as your administrator username. If that is what you use (and it most likely is, since it’s the default), change it. Also, be sure to use a strong password. We recommend a randomized one from a password generator such as http://strongpasswordgenerator.com/.

As a second measure, consider installing a nifty plugin (Thanks Le’Rhone!) called (aptly) Limit Login Attempts, which will limit failed login attempts from a given IP address.

Lastly, you can always try the nuclear option, which will only allow users to log in to the admin from a list of whitelisted IPs. Only use this option if you typically log in from a static IP such as an office.

If this event is not a call for better built-in WordPress security, then I don’t know what is. While we wait for the powers that be to improve, check out the Better WP Security plugin(thanks again Le’Rhone!).

Technology wise, we use OpenGL ES to leverage the Raspberry Pi’s built-in 3D capabilities for fast rendering and Python to communicate with various Internet APIs to pull the data. It won’t end there, though. We have plans to expand the screen to display our portfolio and more.

As a Pennsylvania-based water utility company, Aqua America provides water and wastewater services to over three million people throughout the country.

The organization enlisted Archer to redesign its primary website, aquaamerica.com. The site was designed to appeal to Aqua’s diverse customer base and needed to support the brand’s positioning as a local utility, even to customers located thousands of miles away from Aqua’s headquarters in PA.

Customer service is a standard for any utility provider, and Aqua’s goal was to make the customer service calls-to-action as prominent as possible so that customers can access it from any page on the site. As a result, a persistent customer service bar appears on almost all pages of the website.

Hoagiefest 2012 marked the well-loved campaign’s fifth year, and it was time for reinvention. There was an exciting new promotion, and Wawa wanted to evolve the look and feel from the original Peter Max-style animations to focus more on the food and the breadth of the offer (all 30+ Classic Hoagie varieties, including breakfast hoagies, on sale for the duration of the campaign). Not everything would change though—it was also important to preserve the spirit of Hoagiefest that Wawa fans have come to cherish.

Setting the scene for a Classic Summer

To make sure the new campaign maintained some elements of the old, Archer conceived a big idea that celebrated summer but was current and more familiar to the Wawa audience. Thus, “Hoagiefest: Classic Summer” was born.

“Classic Summer” spoke to the promotion itself—Classic Hoagies for $4.79—as well as the idea of nostalgic summertime activities. Our creative team developed a campaign that revolved around four timeless summer scenarios—going to the beach, enjoying an amusement pier, visiting a lake, and taking a road trip in a convertible. Delicious Wawa Classic Hoagies were always in the forefront of each execution, along with the vibrant new Hoagiefest logo and tagline “Bigger & Better Than Ever!” In addition, Wawa once again enlisted singer-songwriter Parry Gripp to write three new Hoagiefest songs as fun and memorable as those in previous years.

Bigger, better, broader: Reaching the masses

Hoagiefest 2012 afforded the broadest reach yet. Archer came up with ways to reach customers on all their devices, starting with the newly redesigned Wawa.com. The campaign was perfectly timed with the launch of the redesign, and the new Hoagies & Sandwiches website channel was decked out for Hoagiefest, featuring information about the varieties, in-store deals, and all the ways to get involved in Hoagiefest contests, social media, and more.