19 November 2007

I have to admit, I couldn't remember WebDrivenChurch.com 1.0 looked like until I went to archive.org, typed in the URL and popped up the archived page. Call it the "light blue" template or the "flash" template. Either way it was pretty plain and yet it was a good start...

This version lasted from February 5, 2006 until August 23, 2006 - one week before I began my full time position at the church.

I found creative inspiration in my love for Macromedia Flash. I took screen shots of the timeline and a single layer in the timeline of from Flash 8 Pro and added header information to them. . Not sure where the light blue came from though. Ugh...

WebDrivenChurch.com 2.0 could be labeled the "green" template or the "wilderness" template. It took me from August 23, 2006 until November 18, 2007.

Not sure where my creative inspiration came from other than me looking through numerous designs on cssZenGarden.com and trying my hand at laying out columns using css for positioning. In this case I used the WDC logo as a static background image (doesn't move when the page scrolls). The main image is actually two separate images used as background images inside each column with large margins pushing the content down past the images.

I learned a lot on this round. Instead of modifying an existing template (like I did with version 1.0) I built this one from scratch using css and adding the classic blogger tags (example: <$blogger>) where they needed to go.

My only inspiration using the green and the wilderness scenes is that I grew up in Wyoming and this felt like "home."

WebDrivenChurch.com 3.0 is a step in the right direction for at least two reasons:

1. It simplified things: The layout is clean. It's Web 2.0 in look/feel. It's brighter than the previous version. It's wider layout allows for less overall scrolling.
2. It taught me new stuff: Blogger has since ditched the classic tags in favor of a new system (a much more complicated one) that I had to learn in order to create the layout. However, newer is better. I can now take advantage of new features like the archving tree and the ability to add "widgets" at will.

Creative inspiration: I downloaded a free template for blogger first called Green Marinee. This gave me the basic three column layout I was looking for. From there I used look/feel inspiration from a variety of other sites as I reworked the css to personalize it.

Other tweaks and changes:

1. New WDC logo.
2. New archive functionality based on the new blogger options.
3. Added a Label Cloud: The bigger the label the more posts are in that category.
4. Added a favicon.
5. Added Google Analytics versus StatCounter.
6. Added my picture (so you could put a face with the name...)

Hopefully this template will last me a few years...