It used to be that you needed a fair bit of coding to get a nice looking horizontal navigation bar for your Blogger blog. Not anymore! Let me show you how easy Blogger has made this aspect of your design.
Pages only horizontal navigation in Blogger
Your blog posts are dynamic, ever changing content that appear in reverse chronological order on the homepage of your blog. Blog pages are different in that they contain static content which doesn’t change much and are linked to from your homepage. Two examples of popular blog pages are the About and Contact pages. In Blogger you can create a horizontal navigation bar that uses your pages only. Here’s how:
Create and publish a page.
Dashboard > Edit posts > Edit pages > New page > Add your content > Publish page > Blog tabs > View blog
Done!
For tips on writing an About page, see Blogging with Amy‘s How to Write a Killer About Page. Next up: Horizontal navigation in Blogger – pages, links and labels.
Do you have an About page that you’re proud of? Have you come across an awesome one recently? Please share in the comments below – we’d love to see them!
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There is one question I get asked on my blog time and time again …….
“How do you make those cute picture collages on your blog?”…..”What do you use to edit your pictures?”…….”How do you get words on your pictures?”…..”How do you watermark your pictures?”…..”How do you get those cute frames around your pictures?”
Do you see a pattern here? Everyone wants great pictures on their blog. You don’t have to have photoshop or some other photo editing program to get great pictures on your blog.
Picnik.com is a FREE photo editing site that is so easy to use and full of great options. I used the free version for a few months and loved it SO much I signed up for the premium membership a year and a half ago, which is only $25 a year, and WELL worth it, in my opinion.
I thought today I would share a few Picnik “basics” with you all….then if you have questions or want to know more, just leave a comment and I’ll answer what I can in the comments, or let me know if you’d like to see a post on something specific.
I upload pictures to Picnik straight from my camera, but you can get them from your computer, photobucket, flickr, facebook….numerous other places where you may have pictures stored. Then once you edit them, you can save them to any of those locations. *Picnik is NOT an online storage for photos.
The first thing I do with every picture in the Edit tab click “Auto Fix” – if I don’t like the way that looks, then I go to “Exposure” and auto fix.
(click screen shot to see more detail)
Auto Fix Screen Shot
From there I go to “Colors” and pick “Neutral Picker” and click the dropper on something white. If there is nothing white in my picture I try the auto fix, but I usually don’t like that, so I will play with the slider until the color looks right to me (it’s not usually that far off because I REALLY try and set my white balance when I take pictures.)
From there I crop my picture if it needs it.
After that – just play! Don’t be afraid to try settings and ADJUST them, I rarely ever choose an edit that I use with just one click – I will fade it or something. TRY lots of things, you can always UNDO.
For this post, let’s just cover Frames and Collages – don’t be afraid to adjust colors and sizes, even on the frames. I use the frame boarder the most. Where it says “outer color” click that black box- see all of the colors you can change to!
(click the screen shot to see detail)
Frame color screen shot
you can even get a dropper and pick a color from your picture. You can do the same with the “inner color” as well as, adjust the thickness of your frame. Choose “Caption Height” and adjust the size and this will give you the box below your picture, where I add text, like in my Sweetheart Cherry Cake picture here. To make a collage –
Halloween Cookie Collage
Go to Home, choose Collage
At the bottom left you will see you can choose where you want to get pictures from that you want to put in your collage.
(click screen shot to see more detail)
Picnik Collage Screen Shot
Choose the layout you want. You can adjust the spacing and other things….. I almost ALWAYS change the color! – You will see a black box next to “spacing”
click that black box and you can choose any color you wish for your collage back ground color. (I usually choose white – but I sometimes pick a color like I did here.) After you make your collage you can go to frames and add even more detail….. this post has a great example of a few collages and a picture with round corners (you do that in frames).
You can add text to any of your pictures, frames or collages.
Text on picture
Simply click the Create tab, then Text. Choose a font and type your text in the box and it will show up on your picture, you can then drag it around and place it where you want.
To watermark your picture(s)……Add Text (I usually do white or black) and then fade, I usually fade close to 80%.
Watermark Pictures
It’s all THAT easy!!
Just play around……don’t be afraid to try things!
I’d be happy to answer any questions in the comments section and let me know what other Picnik posts you’d like to see
I’d love for you to visit me in my little corner of the blogsphere at TidyMom.net
I’ve been Stumbling links to blog wear for a few months now. It’s time I brought the master list to you! But first, what is blog wear?
Blog wear is a ready-to-go blog design kit that only needs to be personalized with pictures, text and then installed on your blog. By you. Most of the time blog wear kits have a scrapbook style feel to them, although this is not necessary. You pay a small amount for a kit, download it, personalize and then install the images. Blog wear is a great alternative for someone who wants a custom look to their blog but can’t afford the time or money involved in ordering a custom design.
Most blog wear kits come with instructions only for the Blogger/Blogspot platform. Some include a Typepad banner and a select few are strictly for WordPress.org users. Pay attention to these discrepancies when you are reading product descriptions. Now, on to the list:
THE GREAT BIG LIST OF BLOG WEAR
One thing to note when browsing this list is that shops come and go and products are taken down. I’ve been compiling this list for at least two months and there were already three or four sites that had taken down their blog wear.
Do you know of any other sites with blog wear? Please feel free to leave the links in the comments for our readers to see.
Blog wear tip: Check out FotoFlexer for a free, online image editing program that will allow you to add photos and text to your blog wear images.
THIS GIVEAWAY IS NOW CLOSED.
The winner is comment #18 – Marissa. Congratulations!
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Hi, friends! Dawn here. Looks like it’s time for another giveaway here at BBD and this month it’s hosted by….ME! Literally. I have a few premade blog headers available and would like to give one away. This giveaway is good for bloggers using Blogger/Blogspot, WordPress.com and Typepad Unlimited and Premium accounts.
Here are your choices:
Ribbon
Ticket
Dots
This giveaway package is a $35 value and includes:
personalization of your chosen header – this includes choice of colors and fonts
solid wallpaper color
color coordination of links and other template elements
installation on the following themes/templates: Simple for Blogger, Vigilance for WordPress.com, a predefined theme for Unlimited and Premium accounts inTypepad
To enter, simply leave a comment stating which header you’d choose if you win.
Earn extra entries by doing one or more of the following – BUT make sure to leave a new comment for each thing you do. If you already do the listed things, simply leave a comment stating such.
This giveaway ends Sunday, November 14, 9 PM CST. Random.org will be used to choose the winning comment.
The winner will be notified by email and will have one week to confirm with me, Dawn. If the winner does not claim the prize, a new winner will be chosen.
This site is meant to be an AWESOME resource for bloggers and designers to find ways to improve their blogs. With helpful articles, lists of resources, and much more – we’re looking for great content to help one another out! The $25 fee to get your OWN page right here at the BDN in the Blog Designer Directory can easily be waived just by contributing! To waive the $25 fee, simply e-mail us at [email protected] with your ideas for the following submissions! (We will let you know if they’re already taken!) – 2 or more Tutorials or Articles of your choice. – 5 or more websites you find … [Read more…]
April 4, 2011 By Chris
I graduated from the graphic design program at City College back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, internet-wise. We learned PageMaker 1.0 and Photoshop 2.5 (Before there were layers. That was fun.) If you wanted one of the two color computers (Apple LCIIIs—the rest were black and white Mac classics), you needed to show up around 7:00 every morning. My last year of school I was rocking AOL 1.0. My 2400 baud per second modem would practically smoke every time you tried to download a file. CD-ROMS were still the “next big thing”, so I taught myself Macromind Director 2.0. When the rest of … [Read more…]
OK, I admit it: the only things I know about Seth Godin are that he is bald and doesn’t have a horizontal header on his blog. He has a vertical one. Both points can be easily illustrated. Observe:
Actually, I should say that’s all I knew about Seth Godin until recently. Blogging with Amy published a post talking about how to use and optimize the What Would Seth Godin Do plug-in for WordPress. That’s how I came to find out more about Seth Godin. But first, more about plug-ins.
A plug-in for WordPress and Typepad is a lot like the header gadget for Blogger: a plug-and-play functionality that allows you to optimize your blog in a particular way while minimizing the amount of coding you have to know yourself. Now, back to Seth Godin.
Mr. Godin publishes books, blogs, speaks in front of people and enlightens others about marketing, business and such. He wrote about the unique-to-blogging problem of new visitors to your site being unclear about what was going on but how constantly clarifying things for them would bug out your old readers. Richard K. Miller grabbed on to a bit in that post which recommends using browser cookies to show relevant information, in a prominent place, that changes depending on how many times the visitor has come to the site.
Would you like to see this plug-in in action? Visit Musings of a Housewife. Upon arriving, you’ll see a message box under the post title:
When you visit, I want you to refresh your browser window a few times (three should do it). There. Now, you’re no longer a new visitor and what you should see is this:
The message box is gone!
Removing the message completely for return visitors is only one way to customize this plug-in. You could change the message after a few visits as Darcy at My 3 Boybarians does or leave the message the same for all visitors, new and old, as Theta Mom does. Visit their sites and refresh your browser to gain Regular Reader status and see what happens to the messages. You can even decide on the location of the box: under the post title, under the post content, between the banner and content, and so on.
And now that you know what to look for, why don’t you keep an eye out for this plug-in and leave a comment if you find any really clever ones? I love seeing how creative people can be when given the exact same raw materials to work with.
Up next: What Would Seth Godin Do plug-in for Blogger
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You can find more from Dawn Farias at her site A Bit Bloggish – a place with digital scrapbooking kits, tutorials and tidbits on daily life. Feel free to follow her on Twitter, too!
Have you ever come across a wonderful craft or recipe post with lots of instructions and you wanted to print it out or save it to your computer for later use? I used to use ‘print page’ or I selected the text and chose ‘print selection.’ Not long ago a reader at my photography and Photoshop Elements blog, Everyday Elements, turned me onto Joliprint for printing posts and I love it! It is a very simple yet useful tool to make PDFs of blog posts, which you can either print or save. You can add it to your tool bar, for printing at blogs that don’t have a print option. Simply click on the icon … [Read more…]
November 14, 2010 By Amanda Padgett
Are you new to WordPress.org? Or, are you thinking about moving from Blogger, but aspects of WordPress (like plug-ins) intimidates you? Well, if you are anything like me, the word “plug-in” stresses you out. Before I started a WordPress.org blog, Everyday Elements, I would hear others talking about plug-ins and they seemed so complicated and something I just wanted to steer clear of. 😉 Then, after I had my nice, shiny new blog set up (after much crying, trying to figure out FTP, themes, hosting, you name it), I realized other people had things in their sidebars or posts that I want in my … [Read more…]
October 21, 2010 By Dawn Farias
I’ve been Stumbling links to blog wear for a few months now. It’s time I brought the master list to you! But first, what is blog wear? Blog wear is a ready-to-go blog design kit that only needs to be personalized with pictures, text and then installed on your blog. By you. Most of the time blog wear kits have a scrapbook style feel to them, although this is not necessary. You pay a small amount for a kit, download it, personalize and then install the images. Blog wear is a great alternative for someone who wants a custom look to their blog but can’t afford the time or money … [Read more…]
July 12, 2010 By Amanda Padgett
Posted by Dawn Farias OK, I admit it: the only things I know about Seth Godin are that he is bald and doesn’t have a horizontal header on his blog. He has a vertical one. Both points can be easily illustrated. Observe: Actually, I should say that’s all I knew about Seth Godin until recently. Blogging with Amy published a post talking about how to use and optimize the What Would Seth Godin Do plug-in for WordPress. That’s how I came to find out more about Seth Godin. But first, more about plug-ins. A plug-in for WordPress and Typepad is a lot like the header gadget for Blogger: a … [Read more…]
Are you new to WordPress.org? Or, are you thinking about moving from Blogger, but aspects of WordPress (like plug-ins) intimidates you? Well, if you are anything like me, the word “plug-in” stresses you out. Before I started a WordPress.org blog, Everyday Elements, I would hear others talking about plug-ins and they seemed so complicated and something I just wanted to steer clear of. 😉 Then, after I had my nice, shiny new blog set up (after much crying, trying to figure out FTP, themes, hosting, you name it), I realized other people had things in their sidebars or posts that I want in my … [Read more…]
November 5, 2010 By Dawn Farias
Happy Friday, friends! I was customizing my personal blog a bit and wanted to move the date from above the post title to below. I was pleased with the results and thought I’d share with you the tutorial I found for it as well as my extended customization. Date under post title – Move date in Blogger at Blog Bulk This is a fairly easy and straightforward customization. You will have to get in there and edit your template’s code but it’s not scary! This tutorial was written for Blogger’s layout templates launched in 2006. I am using the Simple template that was launched earlier this … [Read more…]
Here at Beautiful Blog Designs, Amanda recently posted on using Joliprint to create printables of blog posts. Today I’m going to show you how to use Print Friendly in a similar manner. To start, you want to find a blog post that you’d like to print. I am choosing A Weekend Staple at the Polka Dot Plum blog. This is a blog post with a cinnamon roll recipe that doesn’t require yeast (meaning, of course, that you can get to the sugar quicker). However, I actually liked the orange roll version better so I used Print Friendly to cut out the parts of the post that I didn’t require. How to use … [Read more…]
December 16, 2010 By Amanda Padgett
Have you ever come across a wonderful craft or recipe post with lots of instructions and you wanted to print it out or save it to your computer for later use? I used to use ‘print page’ or I selected the text and chose ‘print selection.’ Not long ago a reader at my photography and Photoshop Elements blog, Everyday Elements, turned me onto Joliprint for printing posts and I love it! It is a very simple yet useful tool to make PDFs of blog posts, which you can either print or save. You can add it to your tool bar, for printing at blogs that don’t have a print option. Simply click on the icon … [Read more…]
