A How To

For like 6 months, I've been complaining about the aesthetics of the ole' blog-a-roo and lamenting that I don't have the time to spiff it up.  Well, yesterday, I got off my keister and finally did something about it.  As you can see, the blog banner- or headline where the title of this blog is featured, has gotten an update.  Being a member of the blogging community, I think we all should be sharing tips to help one another, so this inspired me to share exactly how I created this new blog banner and how you can to, using on free, basic programs that almost everyone has on their home computer.  I will post pictures of steps via the Pic Monkey website.

1. Open Microsoft Paint.
2. When the blank document comes up, save it.  (For simplicity, I will assume that you will save it "untitled" and will refer to it is as such throughout the rest of the instructions.)
3. Open Pixlr Express or Pic Monkey and upload the untitled picture by clicking on "Edit a photo" and then uploading it from your computer.  (Please be aware that both of these programs require a Flash player.)

4.  In either program you will need to resize the untitled picture and also "uncheck" the box on both sites to "keep proportions."  This is the most important part of the process and I'm here to tell you that I haven't found what I feel is the correct pixel size for a blogger banner yet.  So here it is: it needs to be 825 pixels wide by 240 pixels high.  Try it out, see what you think.  Let me know if you can get a better fit.

5. Once you've gotten it sized correctly, then you are free to create whatever you want.  I typically tend to change the back ground color which can be done by choosing the "beaker with bubbles"  on the left hand side and then choosing "Warhol." 

After that you can add text by clicking on the the letter "P."

I hope this helps you on your way to making your blog fierce!