Alternative Template Software Tools
Christian Templates Online offers web templates for your church, ministry, or organization featuring popular Christian themes wrapped in bold, beautiful colors and shapes. Our design team is constantly striving to move in new directions; creating website templates that appeal to a wide variety of people. No matter what particular feel your church, ministry or organization is looking for, we’re confident you can find a Christian template to meet (and hopefully, exceed) your needs.
CTO makes use of state of the art tools and software to create the templates that you won’t find anywhere beyond our network of sites. These various tools help us to create website visions that stand out from the rest of the virtual geography of the World Wide Web. These tools include image-editing software, html editors, Flash slide-show software and more. If you can get your hands on them, we recommend Adobe products for HTML and image-editing. The two respective products in question are Dreamweaver: for HTML editing, and Photoshop for image editing. These two software tools are state of the art and widely recognized as the industry standard.
That being said, we recognize that not everyone wants to spend what is required to obtain access to these software tools. If that’s you, fear not! There are other software equivalents that do almost as good a job as Dreamweaver and Photoshop. These tools are free, widely accessible, and will certainly “do the trick” when it comes to allowing you to customize, maintain and update your Christian church or ministry website. Listed below are some of the free software tools we recommend.
IMAGE EDITING :
GIMP: This free software is used to process digital photo images and graphics. Users can use GIMP to create custom logos graphics or to re-work/customize pre-existing graphics or logos. Image-cropping, image resizing, color changes, and image conversions can all be accomplished with GIMP. In addition GIMP can help users create basic animated images in the common GIF format. GIMP works very well as a replacement for Adobe Photoshop, the graphics industry standard for image editing.
*Note for Customers Using GIMP: Please note that while GIMP allows you to switch out image layers, at present, it doesn't offer a method for editing a text layer originally created in Photoshop. Therefore, the best option is to hide (or delete) the original text layer, making note of the font styles, and then creating a new layer in place of the original one.
Click here to check out GIMP »
HTML EDITING:
While the Christian and church templates featured at Christian Templates Online are designed to be easily managed and maintained, a basic, pre-requisite knowledge of HTML is necessary in order to alter, and create new pages for publising to the World Wide Web. While we use Adobe Dreamweaver, the industry standard software, to accomplish this task, other, free HTML editors also exist.
Nvu: This is “a complete Web Authoring System for Linux desktop users as well as for Microsoft Windows and Macintosh users”. This program rivals Dreamweaver and Frontpage.
Click here to check out Nvu »
FLASH PRESENTATIONS:
** Please note, we at Christian Templates Online use a third party software tool, called Flash Slide Show Maker, to create the impressive Flash presentations that serve as an integral part of many of our templates. That being said, we DO NOT have access to the editable Flash files themselves. We merely have access to the finished, flattened file.
If you want to create your own slide-show, we recommend you download this same software. It’s not free, but it is very reasonable. And it allows you to create Flash presentations with no pre-requisite knowledge of the inner machinations of Flash itself.
Flash Slide Show Maker: While overly animated websites have quickly become passé; (after all who wants to sit through a long animation program every time they visit the Web?), animated presentations, when tastefully done, can still offer some life and movement to a website. For Christian templates offered at CTO we often use Flash slide-show presentations to feature a seamless presentation of related images. Seamless is a keyword there! You want these presentations to slide by effortlessly.
To easily put together a custom slide show that does the trick, we highly recommend Flash Slide Show Maker. This software tool lets you put together a Flash presentation with control over the way transitions work between your various images.
Click here to check out Flash Slide Show Maker » |
