Need To Make Banners Or Headers For Your Collections, Stores, Or Posts?

by | Building a Blog, Little things, Marketing, POD Business

If you need to make a professional looking graphic for your headers or banners it is no secret that Picmonkey and Canva are free, easy, and accessible.

However, maybe you didn’t know about that, yet.

It is easy to sign up for free access to most of the features and use the online editor. However I use the premium, for the extra features. Want to access those? Use my handy affiliate link for Picmonkey, and support me while you do yourself a favor and gain some really useful apps for graphics.

Picmonkey

Here is a link for Canva:

Canva for Web

Canva is very clear that their graphics are for personal use only. So nothing made on their site should be sold, although I am sure that you can make personal headers for your store or collections on this site.

Picmonkey has no dire warnings, so I am not sure about the use of your graphics, although they will be perfectly fine for anything personal, as well. Personal use is posting on your social media, blogs, etc. as well as making products for yourself, like cards you want to send.

Commercial would include POD products like those sold on Zazzle, etc.

Right now the only things I am recommending these sites for is the personal usage. Making Facebook headers, headers for your store, or profile pics. Collection and category graphics which can all be branded with your particular style.

 

Making Graphics The Simple Way

Making Graphics The Simple Way

by | Little things, Webhelp

I am leaving this post online as a legacy post. In the years intervening since 2015 and now, I had to make a decision between using Picmonkey and Canva. Canva won, and I have not looked back. Canva grew into a very powerful program for making all sorts of graphics. I no longer use Picmonkey.

Making My Graphics

Since making my own graphics became really important to blogging, I used to spend large blocks of time with photoshop or paint shop pro trying to get something that looked professional. I didn’t always succeed. Today there are so many fabulous apps for turning your photos and graphics into something spectacular in almost no time at all.

Picmonkey Graphics

The one I have been using lately is PicMonkey and I upgraded to their premium “Royale” membership, although it is very economical and gives good results to use their site for free, too. Especially good if you want to test it out before investing your money. I signed up for $33.00 a year, which I think is a great value. They have so many elements, fonts, and papers that it saves loads of time look or trying to make them for your pictures. I have only made a few so far, but I think the Picmonkey graphics are really an asset to my pages. View one here, my Urban Gardening page. It is grungy, and has a cool font for the text that is one of many in the editing program. The overlay makes it look like those vintage, upscale photo effects that professional photographers sometimes use.

The Learning Curve

All graphics editors have a learning curve, but this program makes it fun and easy, and there are plenty of tutorial on their blog and from users on youtube. While I’ve used other programs, this one is something I will be spending time mastering so I can quickly create updated feature photos for my blog (one of the things that most needs improvement on my garden blog. Blurry enlarged pictures just won’t do! That reminds me of another feature I like in the Picmonkey program: the three easy sizing options. I used the smallest file size, resolution option for my web use. Next I plant to try out bigger files saved for printing purposes and see how that works. That means I can make a printable or my own Christmas cards. (Without having to open a whole new program).  

How To Use Picmonkey

That is the latest and greatest from my experimentations… view the video to see how easy this is to use. http://youtu.be/FDM-E1kWZrQ Try it out and come back to tell me how you have been making graphics, or if this is your first effort. Was it easy for you? did you get the result you were hoping for? How do you use this program… to make a card? for twitter or facebook? On your own blog? Let me know.

Assorted Tips To Help You Blog

by | Little things

  • People love  “how-to” posts, illustrated with photos; they love lists “10 Ways To…” and reviews.
  • Make your titles interesting, clearly related to the post topic.
  • Fill in the “alt” tags on images with descriptive keyword that identifies the subject.
  • Link to your own content within your posts.
  • Create a Newsletter and publish it with interesting things to reward your loyal fans.
  • Add at least one picture to each standard post (this is an “aside” post type).

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Camera + App Makes My Blog Pictures Pop

by | Little things

garden photo

Flower Photo for the Garden Blog

I still use a regular digital camera, but the iPhone has made it so much easier to add photos to my blogs. It wasn’t too long after trying out Instagram that I wanted some quick and easy filters and effects on my iPhone photos for the blog.

Along comes advice to try out Camera+, a robust photo editing app for your phone. It makes it easy to add frames, filter effects and numerous tweaks to the original photo. I find it simple to use and learn.

I am actually ready to start upgrading to premium  filters and frames; which says lots for the app, since I am notoriously cheap frugal .

Right now I am experimenting to find the styles and effects that I like the best, but one feature that is a real time saver is the way it adds captions to the frames.

To see some of the latest results view the new garden journal blogpost summing up the garden in July.

This app is not expensive, and I think you should try it out. It has lots of ways to give Instagram-like frames and looks and many of its own, along with many editing tools to give variety and good looks to your phone photos. Easy to save and share, too.

Google Page Speed

by | Building a Blog, Little things

I switched over to the pagespeed beta offered by Google, recently, It was a major hassle. I had a “bare domain”, this is, without the www. The service required that I switch to the www. form of the domain. I knew I was going to lose a major amount of SEO cred when I divided my domain like that and had all the redirects. What I didn’t know was how hard it would be just to change it. Perhaps that is yet another drawback to horrid Netfirms. The tech people finally helped to get it work at least part time, although I still come up with database error pages- just not all the time. I am hoping it gets ironed out.

Anyway. The switch from Cloudflare, which had so many problems with DOS attacks (not their problem, but still affected me) to Pagespeed beta has been less than stellar ( including the setback of changing my domain address). My google adsense dropped into the small change again.

Maybe when on a bad host like Netfirms you have to have a service like Cloudflare to handle all the bad traffic and problems from hackers? I wish I knew. I know what you are thinking, why not just change hosts? Well, I’ve been looking. Many of the recommended ones have been taken by the conglomerate that made Netfirms so unsatisfactory.  Why work to change to something like that? So, I am still looking….

In the meantime, while Pagespeed has helped the problem of my need for faster pages and the use of a CDN, It is hard for a person like me, someone only a tiny bit knowledgeable about code, domain pointing, MySql and all that stuff. Not very user friendly for those like me.

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