Building A Website Design

Before publicizing your website, you'll want to take a break from writing and do some graphic design work to make your site attractive and unique.

Choosing to write in Publisher-For-You blog mode using a template with a default color scheme was easy. The result is pleasant to the eye and appealing, but I would like to create a header with graphic elements that will help to brand my knitting patterns and my website name. I want to stand out from the crowd.

I joined iStock photos from the Design section of Publisher-For-You; this is a fun site with a ton of phots, illustrations, and even videos. I joined and purchased 10 photo credits for $10.

If you follow my method, the site becomes super easy to use. I created a lightbox for my knitting website project (the lightbox link is in the top menu), and then I searched for pictures to put aside for future consideration. I saved each page that had even one picture I liked to my lightbox (the Add to Lightbox link is at the bottom of every page). After you've saved a number of pages, it's easier to go into the lightbox and delete the pictures you don't want, than it is to copy/paste the numbers of the pictures you dowant, one at a time, into the lightbox.

It's then just a couple clicks to download the images you want to use; the credits are immediately subtracted from your credit total. I already downloaded two images that got lost when my computer crashed, so now I only download what I'm going to upload to my website right away.

Since my computer crash, I have been "demoted" to temporarily using a borrowed computer with Windows 98. The graphics design program mentioned in Publisher-For-You does not support Windows 98, so I had to download GIMP, which is a similar open source program. I did a Google search until I found instructions that helped me make a banner using GIMP. I can help you do this if necessary, as it is complicated to describe here. The design steps are similar in all Photoshop-like programs.

Basically, I created a New image from the drop-down File, and made it the color and size I wanted. Then I imported the graphic I wanted to use, scaled it to fit the height of my header image, copy/pasted it into that image, and then added text.

On the header for this howto site, I used the fade tool to get rid of the sharp line between my picture of the baby on the computer and the orange background. Overlapping the text onto the picture also gave the header dimension. I kept it simple because I wanted to move on to publicizing my site quickly.

By the time I finished these two headers, my creative urges were exhausted and I was happy to go back to point-and-click Publisher-For-You. The instructions for installing the banner/header in the Design>Header section are super simple.

Voila! I've designed a header that gives my affiliate website a unique, professional edge. I experimented with some different color changes amongst the default color schemes to find the one combination that looks best with my new header. You can also create your own color blends that you can then substitute for the sidebar buttons, for example, or other elements of your site. I'll come back to this when I want to devote more time to it, for now I've created a look like no other Publisher-For-You site.

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