Living Open Source» Web Design

Yet Another Five WordPress driven churches

Tim — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 09:14:21 +0000

The steady flow of e-mails highlighting churches using WordPress to share their story on-line continues. I don’t always get round to adding them to the directory, but I try. Here are five more new and updated examples of what you can do with this great tool.

I’m currently working on my most advanced church theme to date. With bells and whistles like a theme option page to configure those bits everybody e-mails me about and a few extra javascript tricks. Watch this space…

For now here are five, no actually six, churches I’ve noticed from the directory.

Freshchurch, Brisbane

Westbrooke Church, KS

Clearforkalliance Church, Ohio

Cottingham Road Baptist Church, Hull

Cutler Ridge United Methodist Church, Florida

Decorah Covenant Church, Iowa

I’m very pleased to add Hull to my map of WordPress-driven churches (their e-mail arrived while I was typing this post!).

In case you were wondering, some of the themes being used here that are available to download:

Mimbo – a nice magazine style theme
UPSILON – my own most popular theme, seen here with some nice colour adjustments.
Cutline – a beautifully elegant and clean theme that has been around for a while.
Ocean Mist – a really chilled out kind of theme that is being used by a number of churches, especially those on the ready hosted flavour of WP at WordPress.com

In case you still think that you need some geek, or a big budget to set this up, the Cutline theme and Ocean Mist themes are both already installed for you at Wordpress.com where you can have your church on-line within the next 10 seconds with no exchange of currency…so what are you waiting for?

Parliment.uk should have saved their £3m

Tim — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 17:36:02 +0000

MPs have just spent £3 million of my hard earned cash redesigning the UK parliamentary website! You might expect it to look awesome for that money. But it is horrible!

Actually the full cost was £3,644,000. Apparently this is a “radical upgrade” according the tech savey MPs responsible. Imagine what it must have looked like before, if this is, as their spokesman described it, an “improved design and navigation”. And just get this, they have bought an on-line calendar of parliamentary business for the money. I’m sure Google calendar is cheaper!

I wonder which useless IT firm has managed to secure the contract for this job? They have displayed a total lack of talent and managed to pull the wool over the eyes of our dummy MPs. They could probably sell the same MPs a Ford focus and pretend it is a Porsche.

Am I bitter? Of course I am; this my tax money they are spending. And they could have done all this in WordPress and saved £3m.

Check it out for yourself: the parliament.uk site.

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: