Let me start by saying Piknik.com is the shiz. This site let me EASILY create the custom "Living Today's Tech" button. Within the website's program, I was able to search for some picture to use as a starting point, then customize using a host of different options. After, I could cut, crop, or resize to my heart's content. I must say, it was some VERY impressive free software.
Now then, let's get on with it.
How to Create a Button for a Blog:
- Visualize what you want your blog button to look like.
- This is extremely important, because one can quickly be overwhelmed by all the options outs there.
- Go to www.Picnik.com and click "Get started now!"
- After a brief load screen, you're ready to get started.
3. Your next screen should give you several options. The ones we are interested in are "Upload a photo" and/or "Open a Demo photo" (see photo below). In my case, I clicked "Open a Demo."
4. Once in the program, you are once again faced with several options to get to the raw picture you are wanting to edit. If you plan on pulling a random picture from a search engine (as I did for mine), click the link under "library" which the arrow is pointing to below. Otherwise, make your selection and move on.
 |
| How the selection process looks |
5. Once you've made your selection, click "Edit" at the bottom of the photo. Once in the editor, your screen should look like the picture below.
 |
| Zoom using the tool in the bottom-right. |
My next steps were to crop and re-size the picture. Finally, I added a load of special effects from the website's free options. Each of these is covered in the next part of the story.
