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
Why can’t I see the video above? The link isn’t working for me=( HELP
Thanks for the written out tips…
Hi Trisha, I was wondering if you could tell me how to make the “grab this button” so the text shows. I have the graphic part ready and on my site (if you go here you can see) but I don’t know how to make it so others can grab it.. Maybe I’m missing something. thanks for any feedback.. warmly, Jenn
Great!
But I am actually googling for
a simple “grab this banner button or scroll box with the html banner codes & without activating the banner”
Having hard time googling for one. Can you help.
Any idea how to do this on a Mac? I googled it, but no one seems to know. This is really helpful information, but I’m a Mac user … HELP!
The next tutorial should be how to add the “grab my button” form that’s been popping up on everyone’s blogs lately.
This was awesome, thanks!!
I googled how to make a grab button and now it looks great [and it works!]
*thumbs up*
@ Michelle:
Leo!
My DH put it up one day when I had a headache or something to make me feel better. I havent taken it down yet.
who’s the guy on your screensaver? At first the hair made me think it was Rob Pattinson, but I think it might be an old photo of Leo Dicaprio. Am I right?
thanks for the tutorial
@ Sarah:
thanks sarah!
Awesome! I did one that tells people how to make their button grab-able a while ago
http://theohanamama.com/2009/02/helpful-hints-from-ohana-mama-creating-a-grab-button/
Yeah, how do you put the html on there so someone else can grab it? @ Trisha-admin:
Tracye wrote:
you mean the HTML?
I wish I would have seen this before I paid someone to create one for me.
Awesome, thanks!
Now, can you tell us how to make it so other people can put it on their blogs?
awesome!
Creating my own button was so easy and the result looks really fresh! Thanks so much for the video tutorial. Now, I just have to find that post I saw a while back about how to code this…
And, of course, it was nice looking at all the buttons on your sidebar for inspiration! Thanks, Abbie
That is great! I think this is very useful for everyone!
Thanks Trisha , You made it seems to easy ! I will have to go check it out and see if I can do one of these !
Are you guys psychic!?? I was just heading over to Google to find out how to do this. Thought I’d pop in here first and lo-and-behold, you’ve already got it written out for me.
Thanks!
Cool tutorial