The 'Perks' of Blogging

This post is dedicated to Mrs. Perkins who wanted me to give a little 101 on how I tweak my blog.

I have to tell you that I find it a bit humorous that I would be giving any advice in this department as I don't really know what I'm doing. In all honesty I use google a lot.

So.... What do I do when I'm bored of my blog? I'll take it step by step.

1) Backgrounds are essential to my happiness. Easy backgrounds that you can find in places like hotbliggityblog.com.

Beautifulblogdesigns.blogspot.com, has a nice list of most of these sites. I particularly like Shabby Blogs, Aqua Poppy, Delightful Dots, and Scrap-e-blogs. This is the easiest part of a make over.

2) Headers are all over the place in the blog design sights. You can get them to match your background, or your personality. You also have to download each and everyone and tweak it to what you want. This annoys me and I really can't stand my header being one big obnoxious rectangle. It looks off to me, (cute on everyone else's blog, but annoying on my own). So I have been tweaking around with making some of my own.





I have a freely downloadable program called PAINT.NET, it's pretty basic but serves my purposes fairly well. Another more in depth program that I used to have is gimp and it's far more complicated to use (a lot like adobe) but free.

The trick is to use a .png file when you save. I don't know why but it works better and if you want anything transparent you won't be able to get that effect with .jpg, again I have no clue why.

a) Got it so far? Okay, to make a header you must play around like mad in your photoshop program. There are plenty of tutorials out there that you can tweak to your use. Like how to make wood. However, because your using a tutorial for adobe in your other program you'll need to know your program a little and how it will work. So play around... it won't bite.

b) I really like my headers to not be rectangular so I make my background transparent. That way it will blend in with my blogs background.


3) Okay thirdly... I have discovered that there are TONS of digital scrapbookers out there that give out free packages for personal use. This means that if your blog has ads you make money on then you can't use them on your site (at least that's the way I interpret it, my husband will now tell me if I'm wrong). Best place to start when looking for such things would be digifree.blogspot.com or just google what you are looking for. Like 'flowers' the trick to googling this sort of thing is to type in 'graphics' (free flower graphics) or (digital scrapbooking flowers). If you aren't finding what you need try going over to google images search.

Alright, that was a long blog. I will post more tomorrow and make you all either immensely happy or terribly bored.

Comments

Evelyn said…
Thank you THANKYOU for getting into the nitty gritty of it! If you think YOU are clueless it must be a miracle I can even turn my computer on. I didn't know about ANY of this beyond the first paragraph. Thanks again! (Boy! If you don't know how to make a girl feel special! A whole post dedicated to ME!! Yippee!!!)
Cannwin said…
I'm sure that I've missed a lot of stuff so ask me questions if you have any.

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