Making Buttons and Banners
The best way to get the word out about your website is to make a banner that other sites can use to link to you. (Check out the next section, Link Exchanges, for more info!)
If your site is about cats, we can use some cat pictures as a background to show people what the site is about. You can make your banner in a program like Paint Shop Pro - it's harder then Microsoft Paint but you're ready for a challenge if you're ready to be a webmaster! You can download a trial version of Paint Shop Pro to use.
- Go to File and select NEW since we are starting a new picture. A window will come up with some options - the main thing we want to change is the size and the colors. We only need 256 colors because we are making this for the web. There's not really a standard size for a banner except that its wider than it is taller. So for this example we'll use 250 pixels wide and 50 pixels tall.
When you have all the numbers in, click on OK. - We now have a blank banner to work with!
Let's copy and paste a picture of a cat to use as the background. You can find some on the web if you don't have any on your website. When you have the picture copied, go to the Edit menu, select Paste, and choose AS NEW SELECTION. This will put the cat in our banner.
- Now we need to add some text to it so everyone knows it's our website! Click on the Text Tool, or the "A," on the bar at the left. After you have selected the Text Tool, right-click on your picture to be able to add text. (You'll see the cursor change.) Now we can type the name of your site. You can change the font and the size to whatever you want, and you can change the color here.
Play around with it until you are happy! Be sure that the text is readable against your picture.
Once you have the text, you can use the
tool to move the text around to where you like it. Now we have the image looking like we want it to - we just need to save it!
- Go to File and Save As… And choose CompuServe Graphics Interchange (.gif). This makes the file ready to be used on the web. Don't forget to save it in a place where you can find it later!