Moving Your Website to a CMS

Increasingly webmasters are finding easier ways of creating websites. It’s not always that Frontpage (and even Dreamweaver) don’t cut it anymore, but that there newer ways of running a website that are not only easier, but in addition to offering a lot of flashy extra features you couldn’t normally get without being a programmer, they are free. The new trend is to use a content management system (or CMS), the most popular of which in the beautiful world of free, open-source software are Wordpress, Joomla, and Drupal.

If you have ever thought about moving your current website to such a CMS, you may be excited to learn of a new service by a company called PixelCliff that can make your move a LOT easier. For a fee, PixelCliff can take either your existing website design or an artwork file (e.g. Photoshop PSD) and convert it to a fully functional CMS template or theme. The ability to take your design with you goes a long way toward making any switch much more feasable.

There are a couple of added bonuses here. The first is that it is fast. From the time you place your order till you get your finished template takes just 5 business days (or 72 hours if you are in a hurry and willing to fork out the extra cash.) The other bonus is that you get a high-quality product, and that means better SEO, better browser compatibility, and should you ever need to tweak things, more readable code.

To check out the service, visit www.pixelcliff.com.

Better (and Free) Christian Graphics

CreativeMYK is a place for anyone looking for free, quality Christian graphics and photos shared by Christian artists around the world. If you’re like me, you’ve found free (and/or cheap) graphics are often of dubious quality. Which is why I’m cynical about ANY website offering free resources, and Christian websites are no exception. So finding CreativeMYK was a pleasant surprise. I find the quality of the offerings often exceeds what I’m able to find elsewhere, and that makes it a useful resource for both inspiration and graphic elements for design.

Color Combinations for the Web

(This post is updated regularly.)

If you’re wanting to design an eye-catching website, it’s always helpful to know a little about color theory. The most useful book I’ve found on the subject is the Pantone Guide to Communicating with Color; I keep it on my shelf as an ongoing reference resource.

In addition to the background knowledge provided by the Pantone Guide, there are a number of excellent color scheme tools online that will help you put together some sharp color combinations for the web. Here are my favorites:

Color Combinations

• Color Combinations – searchable color combo library, combo tester, and website color grabber.
  
• Colour Lovers – find pre-made color palettes. Bonus tools include the pattern library and COPASO color tool.
• Color Palette by Photo – get a color palette that matches any online image. (Adobe Kuler below offers a similar tool.)
• Name That Color – put names to colors. Sure your friend knows exactly what color periwinkle is, but that doesn’t help you figure out what it looks like, much less apply it to a design in Adobe Fireworks.

Color Palette Tools

• Color Scheme Generator – a simple tool that generates some very sharp color schemes from a single color.
• Color Blender – get the steps between two colors.
• Color Wizard – an advanced color tool that returns a set of hue, saturation and tint/shade variations of your color, as well as suggests color schemes to you, based on your color’s complementary color, split complementary colors, analogous colors and other variations.
• Adobe Kuler – another advanced color palette tool. In addition to tools similar to the Color Wizard above, it can extract color themes from an image and display existing color themes made by other users. Big bonus: it provides the HSV, RGB, LAB, CMYK, and hexadecimal values for each color in the palette.

Bible Verse Finder

Next time you need a Bible verse for a particular topic and can’t quite remember that one you learned in Sunday School, check out Bible Yellow Pages for a quick list of encouraging Bible verses. Not only will you be able to track down that infamous “lion and the lamb” Bible verse, you’ll also be able to track down a verse relevant to your question or situation from a selected list of verses. If it gets any easier than this, I’d like to hear where!

The Bible Changes Lives, on Video

shareyourstorynow.org is essentially a Christian Story Corps that is using video to collect and communicate real stories of how God is using the Bible to change lives.

The American Bible Society is collecting video stories in order to:

1. share glimpses of what God is doing through the Bible to change lives;
2. encourage people to engage the Scriptures; and
3. develop an edifying online community of “Bible Advocates.”

At the core of this work is the belief that God speaks to every generation through the Holy Scriptures (Isaiah 55:10-11), bringing wisdom where there is confusion, faith where there is fear, hope where there is despair, and love where there is hatred.