As Countries in Colors is slowly expanding, with Blue Hong Kong and Blue Bulgaria in development, we thought we would share some tips on how we develop our sites.

1. Content management and site creation

Our primary content management and web development tools are Rapidweaver and Wordpress. Very little technical knowledge is required, and your website can be up and running in minutes, allowing you to focus on content. Wordpress is free, and Rapidweaver is distributed for a small fee.

We’ve extended the feature set of Rapidweaver with the RapidFlickr and Carousel plugins, which allow you to create image galleries and some nifty effects very easily.

There’s a plethora of great plugins available for Wordpress. Those we recommend are category icons, falbum for photo galleries and share this for social bookmarking.

2. Some more advanced web 2.0 style features

A number of nice effects can be obtained by playing with Mootools, a javascript library that allows ajax-like features on your site.

3. Hosting and domain names

We host all of our sites at godaddy, which has nearly instant activation for domain names and hosting services. It’s among the cheapest and is quite reliable. Other hosting companies may be a little cheaper, but nothing replaces instant gratification when you are in a hurry :) The whole setup process is easy and fast, and no paperwork is needed.

As we have large pictures collections, we chose to host them at Flickr, which helps us reduce the space needed on the server space we have from godaddy.

Hope this small primer will be helpful for the amateur website developers out there!

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