Smashing Magazine

Probably the most popular design and web development blog out there, Smashing Magazine has some amazing tutorials and content.  If you don’t really care to learn HTML or CSS, but want to learn how to make things look pretty, this is the place to go.

InstantShift

Very similar to Smashing Magazine, InstantShift has everything from inspiring design, to WordPress hacks, to typography.  If you are looking for resources or inspiration, this is the place to go.  It doesn’t have much in the way of tutorials, but what it lacks in step-by-step teaching it makes up in beauty.

CSS-Tricks

Screencasts, screencasts, screencasts! CSS-Tricks has the best web development screencasts EVER! Seriously, they are probably the easiest way to learn the structure of web design and development.

TutsPlus

If you want to learn a whole mess of stuff (Photoshop, PHP, etc.), then check out TutsPlus.  TutsPlus is a mashup of various web and design tutorials.  It’s a great resource, but can be a bit overwhelming if you are a newbie.

W3Schools

Want to learn the basics?  W3Schools is where you can study everything that you ever wanted about web development (not design).  They have the most widely used coding tutorials ever, with a multitude of different languages and techniques. They even have certification courses.

Do you have any web development tutorial sites that you recommended?

Other articles that you may enjoy:

• Episode #16: Saving a Dying Church Website, Part 3 (productivecatholic.com)
• Episode #15: Get the Liturgy of the Hours in Your Inbox (productivecatholic.com)
• PetrosTV: A Mashup of the Best Catholic Videos Online (productivecatholic.com)
• The 10 Most Fascinating Catholics of 2009 (fallibleblogma.com)

Other posts that you may enjoy:

1. Learn How to Use WordPress from the Pros
2. Episode #14: Productive Catholics Use Netvibes
3. 5 Catholic Social Networking Sites That You Should Know About

Get your free mini-guide: Three Ways to Triple your Efficiency at Work!

© Dean Soto for Productive Catholic , 2010. | SOTO9438 | Read the article at the blog! | 7 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Add new tag, Cascading Style Sheets, HTML, InstantShift, PHP, W3Schools, web, Web design, wordpress

Click here to view the embedded video.

Links that you should check out that were mentioned in the video:

• Natural Design (Dawn’s Blog)
• LiveCatholic (Marcy’s Blog)

Other posts that you may enjoy:

1. Episode #8:Saving a Church Website, Part 2
2. Saving a Failing Church Website, Part 1
3. Make a Beautiful Church Website on the Cheap

Get your free mini-guide: Three Ways to Triple your Efficiency at Work!

© Dean Soto for Productive Catholic , 2009. | SOTO9438 | Read the article at the blog! | 10 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: catholic, church websites, parish, tithe, tithing, web, websites

The Top 5 Catholic Web Apps

Catholic Culture’s Site Reviews – In  a nutshell, Catholic Culture Site Reviews gives Catholics a one-stop shop to find sites that are in-line with the Magisterium.  There are a lot of so-called Catholic sites out there that teach a whole host of stuff that does not coincide with orthodox Catholic teaching, and it’s nice to know that there is a place you can go to find true Catholic sites out there.

Here is a brief overview from the site itself: “Trinity Communications has been providing Catholic Internet users with qualified reviews of Catholic web sites since 1996. Our review staff is led by Jeffrey A. Mirus, Ph.D and is currently maintaining 682 active reviews.”

myCatholic.com – myCatholic is a cool customizable web desktop that is specifically designed for Catholics.  You can set it as your homepage, customize the content, and have the Catholic stuff you want – when you want it.

“myCatholic.com is the first Catholic web portal that allows users to choose their own content, layout, and preferences. It offers daily Mass readings, reflections, news, commentary, custom RSS/Atom feeds, a Catechism study, links, tools, and more.”

XT3 - XT3 is one of the premiere Catholic social networks out there (and one of the best looking).

“Xt3 has so much to offer – It’s so good Pope Benedict XVI sent a message on Xt3! We’ve got discussions, profile pages, global and friends’ prayer walls, podcasts, diocesan homepages, events and projects. You can even ask a priest all those burning questions you have… so why not join now?”

flockNote - I just got my father-in-law hooked on this site. He now uses it for his men’s group.  The premise of this social network is to allow Catholic groups to communicate across multiple platforms.  Whether your members prefer email or social network mediums, you can maintain communication and build up a cohesive group of on fire Catholics.  It is specifically for Catholics, but can be used for pretty much any group.  Very cool.

Phatmass -  The Phatmass phorums are famous.  What started out as a discussion forum, has turned into a social network to the extreme.  It’s not that there are a lot of members on the site, but the members that are there (even the atheists) are die hard supporters of the community.  It is very cool to see how close all of the members are to each other, and the discussions range from the absurd to the profound.

Thank you

Thank you all for participating in this call for Catholic web apps!  I am really excited to see what the future holds for Catholic web development.  In the mean time, get out there and check these sites out!

Other posts that you may enjoy:

1. Update: Last Chance to Vote for the 5 Best Catholic Web Apps
2. Ask the Readers: What Are the Top 5 Catholic Web Apps?
3. My Favorite Productivity Web Apps of 2009

Get your free mini-guide: Three Ways to Triple your Efficiency at Work!

© Dean Soto for Productive Catholic , 2009. | SOTO9438 | Read the article at the blog! | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: catholic, catholic apps, web, web applications

Okay, I have to warn you that this vid is a little bit longer than my other ones.  But that’s okay because it’s about something that I really feel passionate about.  I am excited about this one.  Please, let me know what you think in the comments.   Thanks for watching!!!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Other posts that you may enjoy:

1. Episode #16: Saving a Dying Church Website, Part 3
2. Saving a Failing Church Website, Part 1
3. Make a Beautiful Church Website on the Cheap

Get your free mini-guide: Three Ways to Triple your Efficiency at Work!

© Dean Soto for Productive Catholic , 2009. | SOTO9438 | Read the article at the blog! | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: church websites, natural talents, parish leadership, talent, web

There are only a few stipulations:  The web app needs to be Catholic, it has to be an actual web application (i.e. a social network, web desktop, not a blog), and it has to be your favorite.  Other than that, it’s fair game.

To cast your vote, all you have to do is enter your favorite Catholic app in the comment section of this post.  All the votes will be tallied up in the near future, and the top 5 winners will be announced.  So if you have a favorite Catholic web app, help get it promoted here!

Other posts that you may enjoy:

1. Update: Last Chance to Vote for the 5 Best Catholic Web Apps
2. The Top 5 Catholic Web Apps of 2009
3. My Favorite Productivity Web Apps of 2009

Get your free mini-guide: Three Ways to Triple your Efficiency at Work!

© Dean Soto for Productive Catholic , 2009. | SOTO9438 | Read the article at the blog! | 8 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: apps, catholic, catholic media, Catholic Social Networking, catholic web, web, web apps

Anyway, my love for WordPress aside, there is a relatively new site out there called WordPress.tv.  Now, rather than having to rely on sifting through a plethora of documentation, you can watch recorded video tutorials from the developers and elite users of WordPress.  It’s a great way to get started, quickly!

WordPress.tv – The Best WordPress Tutorials Ever! via MakeUseOf

Other posts that you may enjoy:

1. 26 WordPress Plugins That You Absolutely Must Have for Your Blog
2. Build a Blog and Impress Your Friends
3. Tumblr Adds Video to Their iPhone App

Get your free mini-guide: Three Ways to Triple your Efficiency at Work!

© Dean Soto for Productive Catholic , 2009. | SOTO9438 | Read the article at the blog! | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: blog, blogging, tutorials, web, wordpress

Photo by Bull3t

Dropbox

This amazing and very simple tool deserves to be on the top of this list without any competition even coming close.  Dropbox is God’s gift to productivity.  It’s free for up to 2 gigabytes of storage, and it essentially allows you to have a folder on multiple computers that syncs to dropbox and each respective folder.  In other words, that picture of you with bumping fists with Pope Benedict can be available anywhere in the world and on any computer you own.  Even if you aren’t on your computer, you can use their web interface to get your files.  It’s that awesome!

Google Apps

If you have a small business and you aren’t using Google Apps Standard, please sell it.  Yes, you heard me, sell your business now because you obviously like throwing your money away on things you can get for free.  Google Apps Standard (and even the premium version) is a fantastic platform for email, calendar, and word processing.  Think about it, you basically get the superior spam filtering of GMail, with 7 gb of storage, routing to your own domain name (i.e. yourbusiness.com) ,and everything else you need to communicate to customers and staff FOR FREE.  Even if you don’t have a business, it’s a great way to brand your blog or website.  Okay, I’m done.

Evernote

Never forgot that recipe that you found on the Mac & Cheese box at the grocery store, or your wife’s 20 honey-do list that she graciously left next to your car keys.  With Evernote you can take a picture, type, or record audio of whatever you want to remember.  Not only that, their text recognition software allows you to search the text of things that you took a picture of (i.e. your pool man’s business card).

Netvibes

You are probably thinking, why in the heck is Netvibes up here?  It’s because Netvibes brings it all together, baby!  Netvibes a one stop shop for all of your blog reading, email/calendar checking, and social media upkeeping.  Seriously, I have 10 email accounts on my Netvibes homepage that would go unnoticed without it.  Not only that, I am able to read all of my Catholic, tech, and news blogs – and then Tweet about them in the matter of a few minutes.  It is seriously a huge time-saver.

That’s it!

Hopefully you aren’t disappointed that I only use 4 web apps to maintain optimum productivity, but why complicate things with a whole bunch of tools?  If you stick with a few that work with your personality, you’ll find that it’s much easier to keep track of your life.

What tools do you use?  Am I wrong in using only a few specific tools?  Let me know what you think in the comments.

Other posts that you may enjoy:

1. The Top 5 Catholic Web Apps of 2009
2. 3 Linux Apps to Make You More Productive
3. Three False Ideas about Productivity

Get your free mini-guide: Three Ways to Triple your Efficiency at Work!

© Dean Soto for Productive Catholic , 2009. | SOTO9438 | Read the article at the blog! | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: apps, google, Productive, Productivity, productivity applications, small business, web

Photos By J/F/Photos and BillaDay

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin – One of the best ways to let visitors find content that is relevant to what they are looking for is to offer them some related posts. YARRP is very customizable, and you can make related posts as accurate or inaccurate as you desire.

WP Super Cache – If you are hosting your blog on a shared server (which you most likely are), if you write a post that brings in a rush of visitors it is likely that your server will not be able to accommodate all the requests and will likely go keel over and die.  Well, not with this plugin.  It serves static HTML files on pages with high volumes of traffic rather than processing PHP with every request.

WP-SpamFree – An extremely powerful anti-spam plugin that virtually eliminates comment spam.  It also has a handy contact form too!

WordPress Popular Posts – Retrieves the most active entries of your blog and displays them with your own formatting. Popular posts are usually one of the most clicked on items by new visitors.

WordPress Mobile Edition – A lot of people have smart phones now. So you might as well make your blog more accessible for people on the go. This plugins does just that.

WordPress Database Backup – Unless you want to find all of your hard work gone one day, you might want to install this baby. You can schedule regular backups of all your stuff and have it emailed to you.

WordPress.com Stats – Google Analytics is great, but sometimes you need something a little bit more simple. WordPress Stats lets you see see a condensed version of all the visitors to your site on your dashboard.

What Would Seth Godin Do – Let new visitors know they are welcome, and let loyal visitors know that you still love them. This plugin sets a cookie and let’s you give varying messages to new and returning visitors. You can see a demo of this at the top of this post.

Viper’s Video Quicktags – Easily display embedded video from all of the major video sites. You can also adjust how the video player looks on your blog.

Simple Tags – Simple Tags helps you to find the appropriate tags for your post. You can get suggestions from Yahoo and other tag generators, or use your own.

Referrer Detector – This plugin detects where your visitors are coming from and gives them a message accordingly. If you are visiting this page from a major social bookmarking site, there is likely a demo of this plugin at the bottom of this post.

Ozh’ Better Feed – Customize your RSS feed any way you want. This is one of the coolest RSS plugins out there. If you want to make your subscribers feel special with content that only they have access to, this is the plugin you need.

No Self Pings – Stop pingbacking yourself in you comments when you are trying to bring people to other great links on your site. This plugin is a must if you won’t want to look self-centered.

Nofollow Blogroll SEO – Save your SEO. This plugin tags all of your blogroll with the “nofollow” tag. That way you can give your friends link love without sacrificing your pagerank.

MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer – Keeps you from looking like a ping spammer every time you update a post. Ping optimizer only pings the addresses in your ping list when you first publish your post or if you manually make Ping Optimizer do it.

Google XML Sitemaps – An AWESOME plugin that not only makes sitemaps for going and automatically submits them, but also Yahoo, ASK, and Bing. Very easy to use, and great for SEO.

Google Analytics for WordPress – Let’s you track everything on your site using Google Analytics. Very good if you really want to see what users are doing on your site.

Get Recent Comments – Just as the name says… this post gets recent comments. You can display recent comments in your sidebar too, which let’s your visitors get some face time and link love.

FeedBurner FeedSmith – This is a popular one. Basically it lets you redirect your RSS feed to Feedburner so you can track your subscribers better.

Enforce www. Preference – Keep your site from confusing Google. This one redirects users to either www.yourdomain.com or yourdomain.com. This prevents Google from penalizing your site for creating duplicate content. (A big thank you to Nathan Snell for this one.)

DISQUS Comment System – I’ve tried IntenseDebate and I hate the default wordpress commenting system, so I went with Disqus. The cool thing about it is that Facebook and Twitter users can use their respective accounts to login. Also, mobile users can do the same. It’s been great so far. One thing to note is that it breaks XHTML validation. So if you are sad about invalid XHTML, sorry.

Comment Redirect – Redirect first-time comments to a page of your choice. Great for if you want new visitors to see certain material.

Broken Link Checker – Checks your posts for broken links and missing images and notifies you on the dashboard if any are found.

All in One SEO Pack – Hands down the best SEO plugin there is. It gets better with every update and is pretty much usable upon installation.

Akismet – Pretty much everyone knows this plugin. It’s a great spam filter. Use this with the aforementioned WP-Spam Free and you will have pretty close to 99.99% effective spam protection.

Add to Any: Share/Bookmark/Email Button – The best looking and most comprehensive social bookmarking plugin. The only problem with it is its incessant self promotion. Other than that, it’s great.

Hopefully this list helped out! If there are any other plugins that I should have mentioned – or that I absolutely must use – please let me know in the comments!

Other posts that you may enjoy:

1. Learn How to Use WordPress from the Pros
2. Build a Blog and Impress Your Friends
3. Make Your Own Holy Day of Obligation Reminder Widget

Get your free mini-guide: Three Ways to Triple your Efficiency at Work!

© Dean Soto for Productive Catholic , 2009. | SOTO9438 | Read the article at the blog! | 6 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: blog, blogging, plugins, web, wordpress, wordpress plugins

Photo by Paul Soucy

Find a Host for $150 (or Less) Every 2 Years

It is not expensive to have a website hosted.  There a ton of hosting companies out there that have plans that literally cost around $3.95 – $5.95 a month.  That is nothing when you consider how much exposure a good website can bring to your parish, and how it can create solid communities that wouldn’t exist otherwise.  Here are three web hosts that offer low prices, and great service.  I am not getting a dime from them for this:

• Bluehost – These are the guys that I use.  They offer unlimited space and bandwidth for a very low price.  They’ve been good to me and I definitely recommend them.
• Hostgator – I’ve heard good things about these guys.  They are generally the same as Bluehost as far as pricing.
• Dreamhost – Another well-like web host service.

Install a Content Management System (CMS)

Once you’ve picked a host, it’s time to choose a Content Management System (CMS).  A CMS allows you to quickly add content to a site in an orderly manner.  Two CMSs that I really like are Drupal, and even more so, Joomla.

I’ve used Joomla on a number of sites and I really feel that it is one of the easiest tools to create and manage a website that demands a lot of content.  You can write articles, make communities and groups, and create scalable ecommerce sites.  It is a very powerful product, and it is absolutely FREE!  Yes, I said free.

So pick a CMS that you like, and move on.

Download a Free Template and Add a Personal Touch

You don’t have to be a professional web developer to have a clean-looking website for your parish.  There are tons of free templates out there that only require you to change a header logo or two in order to make it unique. A really good place to look is Joomla24, which has thousands of FREE (there’s that word again) Joomla templates.

If there are no free templates out there, you can always join a template club like Joomlart for approximately $75 a year.  Not bad for some really cool looking templates.

Conclusion

Websites don’t need to be expensive and they don’t require you to hire a software engineer in order to maintain it.  With a little time and research, you can have a professional looking website for your church that will cost less than a cup of coffee a day.

Update: For more tips, check out this article on the Catholic Tech Tips blog: “Can I get some ‘good’ Catholic artwork, Please?”

Other posts that you may enjoy:

1. Saving a Failing Church Website, Part 1
2. Episode #16: Saving a Dying Church Website, Part 3
3. Episode #8:Saving a Church Website, Part 2

Get your free mini-guide: Three Ways to Triple your Efficiency at Work!

© Dean Soto for Productive Catholic , 2009. | SOTO9438 | Read the article at the blog! | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Business, catholic, catholic church, cheap design, cms, content management system, extreme website, Money, Productive, web, web host service, web hosts, wed design