Make Your Own Buttons

So you're tired of bland, boring buttons? Maybe your website is just lacking something that pops out? A great little thing to do would be to make your own buttons. This is great to advertise your accounts on things like Twitter or Hubpages that you want visitors to check out, adding advertisements, or whatever other use you may have for them. It's really quite simple too and I've noticed a lot of websites don't do this but instead just put text links which obviously get lost within other text.

Before you make your own buttons, you need some sort of an image. Any image creation software works just fine. I prefer Adobe Illustrator CS4 but you can do this in Microsoft Paint if that's all you have access to. So start off by creating your image (examples in image below). I went with very simple buttons on my website that link to my blog and my Hubpages account (because I write articles here that are relevant to the website). When I say they're simple, I mean they're a block of color with fairly transparent (simple) designs on top with some text on the top layer, since it looks bad if you put transparent shapes over the text.

Got that done? Cool, you've got the hard part out of the way! (Alright, it's not really that hard to make your own buttons)

Now you need to upload your image somewhere. Photobucket and Imageshack.us are great places to upload your images. I create all of my websites in WordPress so I use my media library and upload them there (straight from my admin panel). This way I know there's no chance of the images being taken offline unless I do it myself. So go ahead and upload your image.

You're going to get a link that looks like:

http://www.imageuploadsite.com/extensiontoyourimage

Copy that link and paste it somewhere that you're not doing to delete it on accident. Now find where ever it is that you're going to put your button. Since I use WordPress and I put the button on the sidebar, I simply use Text widgets. If you want them somewhere that doesn't allow widgets, you'll need to edit your page/header/footer/etc file.

Now you need to create proper image tags. They're going to look like this:

<image alt-"describe image" src="http://www.imageuploadsite.com/extensiontoyourimage" />

If you save the file/widget at this point, you'll have just the image on your website or blog (which may be useful to you at some point). All that's left to do is make the image a clickable link. So you'll need to use link tags that look like this:

<a href="http://siteyouarelinkingto.com/"></a>

Great, just about done! You just need to combine the two like this:

<a href="http://siteyouarelinkingto.com/"><image alt-"describe image" src="http://www.imageuploadsite.com/extensiontoyourimage" /></a>

Save your file/widget and you're done! Check your website to be sure it's showing up properly. If it's not, check your coding. In the image tag, make sure there is a space between the last " and the /.

There you have it, you can now make your own buttons! This same process applies for making your own advertisements if you're going to buy a spot on another website. If you're selling space on your website, you'll only have to get the code (or possibly just the links then write the code yourself) from the buyer and place it just like you would for your own buttons.

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