Want to create a blog badge?First of all, choose the image you want to use as the basis for your badge. You might want to create or amend the image using a graphics application such as Photoshop or Pages, or simply use an image you’ve already got on your computer. A good size for an image that is designed to be used in a blog sidebar would be 150 pixels by 150 pixels.
I’d recommend saving your image as a PNG or JPG file – these are suitable for use on the Internet.
The next step is to upload your new badge to the Internet. My recommendation – because it’s the simple option – is to upload your badge to a free online photo site such as Photobucket.
Once your image is uploaded, you need to find the URL of the image. If you’ve uploaded your image to Photobucket then you will see a box below the image, with one box titled HTML code. Copy the code in this box, it should look something like this:
<a href=”http://s894.photobucket.com/albums/ac146/themads/?action=view¤t=mad-finalist.gif” target=”_blank”><img src=”http://i894.photobucket.com/albums/ac146/themads/mad-finalist.gif” border=”0″ alt=”Photobucket”></a>
Next, replace the website address after the first href (the highlighted bit) with the URL you want your badge to link to, such as your blog’s home page.
You might also want to change the image’s ‘alt tag’ – this is a description of the image that will be read by search engines and will be displayed if for some reason the image doesn’t load. You might want to use your blog name, for example.
Do you now want to let people download the badge to display on their own site?
You just need to create a code box where people can copy/paste the code they need for their own blog.You can do this by using the following HTML code to create a text box
<textarea name=”textarea” cols=”40″ rows=”4″ wrap=”VIRTUAL”>insert code</textarea>
Paste your code into this HTML where it says ‘insert code’
NOTE: If you have uploaded the image to your OWN site then this method still works – you can use the code examples above, but rather than the img src being the photobucket URL it would be the URL of the image on your Wordpress, Blogger or Typepad site. If you’re not sure of an image URL, then view the image in your browser and right-click to see ‘image properties’