Creativepy is built on the Striking template from the Themeforest. The Striking template is very popular with over 1,000 downloads to date.

Kaptin Lin, the creator of the template, has set up a section on his site showcasing the best examples of his templates. We are honored to be on of the six chosen. Thank you Kaptin.

Visit The Showcase Site

The other day I was looking through a catalog for front doors. I was stunned at the beauty of some of the “models.” I was thinking about what a first impression they would make if installed on our house. I further imagined a guest as they came upon our house as they approached the front door to see one of these installed. Then it dawned on me further that like these doors that you can order, most homes, including the affordable and attractive ones, are created from common blueprints, patterns that are repeated elsewhere in the housing development – or in other locations, but with customizations. Let’s call the blueprints “templates”, at least for the sake of my argument here. Most people don’t walk into a well designed home, built from a blueprint used to create other similar homes and think how common the home is. A website is quite similar.

If templates work so well for home building, a complex endeavor indeed, why not for website creation? Now, granted, if you have the budget, a custom plan/blueprint (custom website) can be drawn up for you by an architect, but if you’re like most people, and most small to medium sized businesses out there, a budget dictates the most effective use of your funds.

Now there are literally hundreds of web templates available out there – highly attractive, nicely designed and ready to be implemented into a Content Management System. And the real beauty, assuming you get the right one, is that all the cross-browser compatibility CSS issues have already been worked out for you. Why redesign the house? Why for instance, should one have to re-figure out all the electrical wiring or framing structure for every dwelling you build? You can now take a template you like and work it to the point that it speaks of your company, or your personal service. Often, they come with built-in javascript functionality for cool effects. I’ve found that you can build your site with all kinds of bells and whistles from the ground up but the time it takes to do that is often too costly.

Some of the web template sites I like with a little commentary:

Now for the web designer/developer, there’s still PLENTY of work to be done. The focus is now on the customization, the branding and adapting the site to the business’ or individual’s unique needs. It’s a win-win situation for both.

If you would like me to talk to you about your website, or for an estimate please contact me.

Pete

Repeating the introductory paragraph of what I said on the Portfolio section: New Life La Mesa Presbyterian’s prior site had lots of visual clutter, many structural limitations, no categorization for Sermons, limited to non-existant categorization for the Pastor’s weekly blog posts which had accumulated up to more than 90, and there was no effective way to post important up and coming events on the home page. Over all information retrieval was difficult and the site experience was frustrating, sub-par.

The Usability of the front page had to really work. Church-goers are an eclectic mix: there’s the younger crowd, familiar with and big on online use, then there’s older members that may rarely go on the internet. The front page was structured as follows:

• “New Here” button: this welcome button, so important for a church site, leads to a page dedicated to those finding the website through a search, reference or link.  There’s a friendly welcome paragraph with directions, contact info, sermon & blog links and worship times. Below the New Here button is a “Twitter” feed, which is populated by scripture verses relating to the current liturgy and events.
• Navigation: on a site with nine main categories and 5 blogs, the need for acute organization was imperative. All sub-categories set as “drop-downs”.
• “Hero” rotator: this area is a visual gateway into the site. Each image links to a respective page. It is also an effective way to call attention to events.
• Sermon media bar: the most current Sunday morning sermon can easily be played from the home page with a download option button. The large “All Sermons Here” button leads the user to the sermon main page. Most people are as interested in the Minister as they are the church. Others, such as those that aren’t comfortable with the internet, can listen to the latest sermon from the main page.
• Liturgy post: every week the church’s liturgy is posted (normally Thursday’s) for the “up and coming” Sunday worship. This can be used to read and study the scripture and hymn references to prepare for Sunday worship.
• Right column: first in line “toggles” are used to hide important but clutter producing information. The first for worship times and second for links to download the church’s newsletter in PDF format. Further down are links to the Pastor’s and the Mission’s blog posts. Upcoming Events’ – links fed from the calendar section is placed below this.
• Footer: similar information is displayed here except one very important button – under “New Life Community” is a “Log In Or Sign Up” button. This leads to a social website – still under the NLLM website, that allows groups in the church to securely communicate with each other and to post a number of file types.

The site was implemented at about a 30% savings to the church’s prior vendor and the monthly costs are close to 60% less than before.

This was the result of researching many templates and Content Management Systems (WordPress was chosen). For visual lighting up of the site, read my synopsis in my portfolio section. For the deeper coding help, D3 Solutions did a stellar job with the complex back-end customization and some of the more simple implementation of the theme as well.

The upgrade involved transferring content from about 17 pages, 90 plus blog posts, and re-linking and re-categorizing over 280 sermons.

The site was implemented at about a 30% savings to the church’s prior vendor and the monthly costs are close to 60% less than before.

Visit the site