I highly recommend using Blog Graphics to enhance the Design of your blog. Graphic Design can do so much to separate your blog or website from all the others. For example which website looks more professional judging by the header: The header for my Media Production Blog or the header for Blogger Mogul?
The Media Production Blog is much more plain and I think for that reason, I had to work a lot harder to make it successful. Ultimately it was my resources such as My Blogging School for example that has made it so successful. I might not be the best writer or blogger in the blogosphere but I am the most honest.
I tell you all the blogging tools and methods that have made me successful. I don’t BS you with a bunch of crap that will waste your time. For Example: Never worry about being the top blog on Technorati. It would take you years to build enough links to even get on that list. Trading Technorati Favorites however is a worth-while endeavor.
Back to Blog Graphics and Graphic Design: A lot of people think that you need Adobe Photoshop
Graphic Design Tips for Your Blog
Here are some graphic design tips for those of you who do not have Photoshop. Professional Graphic Design is all about text placement and where you crop the image. It helps to have the filters and special doo-dads that Photoshop affords you but that does not mean that it is necessary.
1. Set the Canvas Size to be extremely small. That way you can just cut and paste the finished graphic rather than trying to trim white space off the canvas.
2. It’s very difficult to resize images in Microsoft Paint so make the graphics fairly large. You can resize them as you import them into your blog posts.
3. Save your graphics as a PNG file. This extension seems to yield the highest quality graphics. When I have saved graphics as a JPEG file the text tends to become fuzzy and faded.
4. Google Images and Flickr are great sources for images to use as Graphics. But I have to advise you that you need to change the graphics to the point where you cannot recognize the original or you risk infringing on someone’s copyright.
5. Don’t try to get too fancy if all you have is Microsoft Paint. Keep it simple. Most of the time I only use it to embed text onto pictures but I have done some fairly neat stuff. If you would like to see some examples you can click here.
6. Always fill in the “alt” text for your graphics. Google’s Image Search works in similar ways as Youtube or its Blog Search. If you can optimize your images, you can bring traffic to your website.
7. Host your images with Flickr and include the url of your blog in the description of the photo. That provides you with possible traffic and a link.
8. Link to individual blog posts in Flickr using this method as well.
I hope that these tips have been helpful for you. I have a list somewhere of more tips and I will incorporate that list into this one when I find it. That’s blogging tip number 2: “Stay Organized” Don’t be like me and have blog posts floating around your room in loose paper.
