Living Open Source» Web Design

Design theft?!

Tim — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 08:31:45 +0000

I gave up trying to retain any control of my WordPress themes a while back. They are now distributed under a GPL license. The reason ? – other Christians thought they could use them without credit, even sell them in a couple of cases and pass them off as their own designs! But check this out…

Who ripped off who here? Was it the mighty Mars Hill or was it Imago Dei being as God-like as they possibly can? Or did they both pay the same guy to produce the coolest and most unique web design he could muster?

Mars Hill

Imago Dei

Of course Christians would never steal someone else’s design, would they?!

Inspiration for your church web design

Tim — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 08:28:34 +0000

I haven’t developed a new WordPress theme for a while, but I have been looking round at what others have been doing with CSS for some inspiration. I came across Church Beauty, a site that showcases some of the best church web designs.

The Street and Lake Ridge are just two of those that stand out at the moment. Of course you shouldn’t just copy someone else’s design, but you may have noticed that many designs share common design elements and ideas.

Church Beauty seems to have been inspired by CSS Beauty, a more general site that has been around for a while focused on great use of CSS. And if you are looking for inspiration for CSS based design you can’t miss CSS Zen Garden either.

What would you like to see in the next WordPress church theme?

The absolute must have book on CSS design is CSS Mastery by Andy Budd an co:

Welcome back to IE6 Users!

Tim — Sun, 20 May 2007 19:13:43 +0000

The number one rule of web design: Test in as many different browsers as you can. The trouble is, I made the mistake of installing Internet Explorer 7, and have not found a way of getting IE6 back. So I apologise to all IE6 readers who until today have had to put up with the sloppy left sidebar design on my blog, which fell foul of the min-height and other CSS bugs in IE6.

Of course if you were using a proper browser like Firefox or Opera, then you won’t have a clue what I’m on about. Until I viewed my site on a friend’s PC, I was totally unaware too.

Hopefully the page you are looking at should now look something like this:

In IE6 it was looking like this (see left sidebar):

All down to IE6′s endless CSS bugs.

It turns out that BrowserShots is the only way I have at present of validating code for IE6 from my wn PC.

New Baptist Union Website goes live

Tim — Tue, 01 May 2007 22:11:19 +0000

The new BUGB web site went live today as promised. And it looks pretty too! The design is much cleaner than the old one. All the usual content is there and space for more as it evolves. There is also the promise of a new forums section. So sign up and join the conversation. It is obviously a little quiet in there at the moment, being day one.

Room for a few tweaks?

Of course there is always room for improvement. The home page doesn’t quite work as a layout for me. It seems upside down. The scrolling website highlights thingy on most sites appears on screen, at the top, even in the header somewhere. So it seems a bit odd that it is scrolling away to itself out of sight. And I know we are all Christians but I’m not sure of the need for a “verse for the day”. It perhaps shouldn’t be in the center of the screen where your latest headline or highlight should be?

Just a couple of suggestions to make an otherwise good design, better.

And why does Mike Roberts get everywhere?

Its always fun spotting people you were at college with in BUGB publications. Great smile.

Nominations for the coolest and worst church websites

Tim — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 20:17:10 +0000

(Image: Copyright Gospel Communications International, Inc – www.reverendfun.com)
I’m on the scrounge for examples of the coolest and not so cool church websites on the planet. The mega churches have fancy websites, a lot of which are not really that great, but my interest is in those churches who are sharing their story online well or are just putting people off.

What do you look for? Good clean designs, relevant, regular content and that living quality that is emerging from churches that blog rather than bloat.