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CstoneChurches.com

April 7, 2012 in design, tech with 2 Comments

I just completed a major overhaul of our church’s website last night. Over a year and a half ago, Cornerstone began to expand through the planting and revitalization of new church campuses. Since that time, the Cornerstone Network has expanded to 6 campuses.

When this began, we changed our original domain, BethaltoChurch.com to CstoneChurches.com. Our desire was to communicate that we were expanding to include more than one location. The website tried to reflect this and had a “Locations” menu.

It worked to an extent, but it didn’t work well. There were at least three glaring problems with the site.

It was basically a Bethalto-specific site with a locations menu tacked on.
Because of the locations menu…Bethalto-specific ministry information was buried in a series of menus.
It was near useless for our other campuses. Each location had a “page” but there just wasn’t room for information about what made that location unique.

So we decided to overhaul it and come up with something more useful.

We decided to make CstoneChurches.com a landing page. It’s basically a “which campus do you want” page with a little information about the Cornerstone Network. I anticipate that we’ll have more information added in the future, but for now, it works.

Then, each of our six campus will have their own websites.

Two of our campuses have their own websites already (Life Community and Simplicity). The landing page points to those external pages.
Two are still in the process of being developed, so I linked to their Facebook pages for now (Deaf Church and Godfrey).
Calhoun has received a brand new site and Bethalto’s site went through a complete redesign.

The last two websites (Calhoun and Bethalto) are located relative to the landing page. For instance, Bethalto’s site is CstoneChurches.com/Bethalto and Calhoun’s site is at CstoneChurches.com/Calhoun. Godfrey’s and Deaf Church’s will use the same convention as well.

Anyway, I’m pumped about the updates. I’m using a beautiful, responsive template from JoomlaBamboo.

Take a minute to check the sites out. I’d love your feedback about what works and what doesn’t.

Google 2010 Year in Review

December 18, 2010 in entertainment, tech with 0 Comments

Well, it’s the time of year for “year in review” videos. I came across one from Google today that was excellent and I thought I’d go ahead and post it here. It starts a bit slow, but it’s worth the whole 3 minutes.

Image Optimizer

December 13, 2010 in tech with 0 Comments

In the last month, I’ve found myself doing an increased amount of work that involves uploading images online. Part of my workflow has been ImageOptim.

Drop an image and it automatically crunches it down and optimizes it for you. Usually you can hit the “Again” button another time or two to further results.

If you add any images online. Run it through this first.

ImageOptim is free for Mac OS X. Download it here.

Christmas Ringtones

November 30, 2010 in entertainment, music, tech with 0 Comments

In order to spread some Christmas cheer, I decided to make some ringtones for the faithful few who still follow my blog. Unlike last time, I’ve included mp3 versions, so my friends without iPhones aren’t left out.

My hope is to make some more throughout the season, so if you have any requests, just let me know in the comments.

1) The First Noel (Phil Wickham) – iPhone | mp3

You can buy Phil Wickham’s Christmas album on his website at philwickham.com. The album has quickly become one of my favorites. It’s traditional, yet he adds just enough to keep these songs fresh. Buy it for someone. Add it to your Christmas list. Just get this album.

2) It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year (Andy Williams) – iPhone | mp3

This is one of my all-time favorite Christmas songs. You can buy the song itself or the whole albumon Amazon

3) Wizards in Winter (Trans-Siberian Orchestra) – iPhone | mp3

I added this one…well I’m not sure why. It became famous a few years ago in a video where the song was synced to some Christmas lights on a house. You can buy the song or the whole album on Amazon.

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iPhone users, download the .m4r file and drag it into “Ringtones” in iTunes. Then attach your iPhone, check your sync settings and then sync.

Grab these while you can. I probably won’t be leaving them up for very long.

Merry Christmas!

Parker Fighter 2

October 12, 2010 in family, funny, parenting, tech with 1 Comment

Yesterday I convinced Parker that we needed to make a movie. He was not thrilled about it. Probably because he really didn’t know what he was getting into. After some arm twisting, I got him to agree.

In my garage, I have a coin-op arcade version of Street Fighter 2 Championship Edition. I spent hours on this machine, working on combos and special moves. I love this game.

Fortunately, Parker and Kent have picked up an appreciation for it (though they haven’t quite figured out how to do the special moves yet). Anyway, I thought it would be fun to make a SF2 movie. Since Kent expressed ZERO interested in dad’s crazy idea, I decided to just use Parker.

The following video is the result of a few quick takes and a couple of hours of editing. It’s VERY rough (bad green screen, line down the middle, etc.), but I want my boys to catch a glimpse of the potential of what we can do. I want them to explore their creative sides and expose them to the creative process in general (from concept to completion). The idea is that I’ll add more elements in the future (character select screen, life bars, timer, etc.) if they want to continue with it.

Anyway, here’s our first take: Parker Fighter 2 (Round 1)