Welcome to “How To” Tuesdays. (In fact, it may turn into “How To Tuesday and Thursdays” depending on the information I am putting out during the week!) This week we are focused on How to Make a Blog Button (i.e. banner) for your blog.
A blog button is an essential staple in advertising your blogs graphic or text on a sidebar of another blog. This is a great way to exchange banners in an advertising format to assist in the cross flow of traffic. Regardless of blogging for fun or for a specific purpose, if you are not bringing in visitors, you can get burned out or frustrated. This is one of the most basic form of bringing in those visitors.
You can use any graphic service you have on your computer and the actual steps may vary depending on what you use, but the overall concept will remain the same. For this example, I am going to be using Photofiltre. Photofiltre is a free program that is user friendly and very simple to master for a beginner.
You can download Photofiltre from Major Geeks as shareware.
Here is a video that shows you exactly step by step the creation of basic 125/125 button for your sidebar. As you get better at this, you can make it more fancy.
[flashvideo filename="videos/blogbutton.flv" width="448" height="361" /]
Step 1: Open your program and create a new document. Resize that document to the size button you are wanting. Most blog buttons are 125/125. Tip: While resizing graphics, if you find that your buttons do not change the size you want, make sure the ‘preserve ratio’ is not checked in the image resizer. If it is, uncheck.
Step 2: At this point, you can drop in color, add shapes, text and more. You can highlight areas and drop colors into the shapes if you want a border.
Step 3: You can go to your OPEN document and open an additional graphic and resize, cut, or drop that graphic right into your blog button size. Tip: If you are already working w/ a graphic and just want text on top of that graphic, instead of opening a new document like Step 1, you can simply open your graphic, resize it, and then add text right on top of it.
Step 4: Save As. Your done!
Screenshots Of Abobe Photoshop Elements 7:
We hope this episode of “How To” helped you today!
~Trisha
I recently made a similar tutorial on creating a blog button. Hope its useful to someone.
http://livingtodaystech.blogspot.com/2011/07/how-to-create-button-for-blog-part-1.html
Thanks so much! It was so easy my 10 yo kid blogger made our 1st button: http://muslimkids.americanmuslimmom.com/making-a-blog-button-with-free-software/