When you have as little talent as I do for color design, there are a few resources which may come in handy. All these resources basically work the same way: give them a base color, and they will suggest other colors that work well with it. This is useful to create a coordinated scheme for the background, highlights, headers, links, etc.

1. Colorschemer

Colorschemer features an extensive collection of color schemes. You can also buy a nifty little app for your desktop or download free dashboard widgets.

2. ws Color Scheme Generator

Color Scheme Generator is a web-based app that provides an instant preview of how your site will look like. It also has some specific features for sites designed for color blind people.

3. Adobe Kuler

Perhaps the strongest contender in this category is Adobe’s Kuler. See for yourself in this tutorial video on AdobeTV.

Wordpress 2.7 is here with a new design for the admin side. I’ll try to start work on an update for Mike Lothar’s Nosebleed, Ad Infinitum and Conundrum templates for Wordpress soon.

Here’s some info about the new Wordpress version:

The autoupdate feature – which was already available for plugins – is now available for the whole software. If only phpbb could take a cue!

There is a new version of phpBB 3 available here. I will look into the changes to see if any immediate update of our adinfinitum/conundrum/nosebleed templates is needed.

You can see the changelog here.

This is beginning to look very sweet. I am impressed.

This new 2.6 version is available here.

Mootools is one of the nice javascript libraries (together with the likes of JQuery) that allows amateur webmasters with little coding experience achieve some great effects. Nice to see that they finally released version 1.2.

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One of my favorite web development tools for the Mac has been updated. Download the new version of Rapidweaver or check out the video tutorials.

There’s a new Rapidweaver version in the making and it will be a free upgrade to 3.6 users! Ars Technica takes a look at some of the new features in the Leopard-only RapidWeaver 4 from Realmac Software.

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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!