24 September 2006

Online Resources

For those of you that attended the Web Strategy Breakout on Thursday, September 22, 2006 - here is the list of resources we talked about (with some extras):

Vendors:

• Aspire!One (our web stategists)
• Fellowship One (web based content management system)
• Christian Video Channel (video streaming)
• Light Cast Media (video streaming)
• NetSuite (top notch e-commerce solution)

Partners:

• Web Empowered Church (WEC) (a community of churches sharing web and internet technologies)

Blogs / RSS Feeds:

• Less Clutter & Noise (web strategy by Kem Meyer Director of Communications at GCC)
• A List Apart (web design)
• Creative Multimedia (all things media)
• Kirupa (web design / tutorials)
• Leave it Behind (Brian Bailey Web Director Fellowship Church)
• Ordered List (Steve Smith Web Developer Notre Dame)
• Web Developer (everything to do with web design)
• 3Cords (a community of Christian bloggers)

Tools:

• Web Design & Development (Macromedia Dreamweaver, Macromedia Contribute, Macromedia Flash all part of Macromedia Studio 8, The Web Developers Handbook, Yahoo Developer Network)
• Imaging / Graphics / Photography (Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, Macromedia Fireworks, iStockPhoto, Stock Exchange, Big Shot Media, Veer, Flickr)
• Video (Adobe Premiere Pro, QuickTime Pro, Flash 8 Pro Video Codec, Sorenson Squeeze 4)
• Streaming Video (See Christian Video Channel and Light Cast above for streaming services, See Sorenson Squeeze 4 above for video compression and the ability to convert digital video into QuickTime (.mov), Windows Media (.wmv), Flash Video (.flv) etc. FFMPEG is also a popular compression tool that is open source and highly customizable though typically not for the beginner)

Hope this simple list is helpful. Feel free to add comments regarding the pros/cons of the listed resources and/or list alternatives that have been useful in your experience.