Twitter the banners you create

CreateBanner.com is the first of Xavier Media’s  services to use our new API for making long boring link short: 2ve.org

The feature we’ve added to use 2ve.org is a Twitter button found in both the VIP area and the banner designer where you can Twitter your banner. The link to your banner will be shortened with the help of 2ve.org, causing the links to be even shorter then TinyURL.com so you can Twitter more text . We’re doing this to give you even more options to share you banners with friends and family (and to give you a chance to show us and the world how good you are at designing banners).

To Twitter about your banner you simply just click on the Twitter icon after you’ve saved your banner. You will then be sent to Twitter with a short link to your banner pre-filled in the message box at Twitter. Easy isn’t it?

As a small side effect of all this you can now follow CreateBanner.com on Twitter. Just click here to follow @CreateBanner. As a follower you will get updates from our blog and a few other banner creation tips and tricks. Later we’ll even give away some trial VIP membership to people who follow us, so make sure you start following us as soon as possible: @CreateBanner

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How to design a banner for free

Surprisingly often I get the question “how do I create a banner” from people. So therefore I’m writing this short tutorial to show you how easily you can do it at CreateBanner.com.

Select a banner size

The first thing you need to do is to select a banner size. We got the most common sizes you your need, but we’re planning to increase the number of sizes in the near future so if you got suggestions please let us know.

The most common size for banner exchanges is the 468×60 banner and the most common sizes for blogs and blog banner exchanges is the 125×125 Medium Button 3.

When you’ve selected the size you want, just click on the “create banner button” to go to the next step.

Write your text

Click on the banner where you would like to start writing your text. You may add up to 15 lines of text per banner by just clicking where you want your text to start.

For each line of text you can select a font, font color, size, angle and many more settings. You can also use the checkbox to add shadow to your text if you like.

If the banner is not updated with the changes you do hit the “Update preview” to redraw the banner.

When you’re done with the first line of text you just click on the banner where the next line of text should start.

Banner colors

You can select to have just one background color (solid) or you can choose two colors that will blend into each other (gradient):

When you select the color you can either click on the color tool to select a color, or you can write the HTML color code in the text field. Easiest is of course to click on the color tool box. If you’ve selected gradient color as background you will have two color toolboxes so you can choose which colors should blend into each other.

This is an example of a banner with solid background color:

And this is an example of a banner with the above background color blending into a white color (gradient):

Border

You can add a border to your banner too is you like. First you select the size of your border (in pixels) and then you select the color you want on your border. The color selection tool is the same as above so if you know the HTML code for the color you want you can fill it in instead of clicking on a color.

Save your banner

When you’ve created a banner you want to use on for example your web site, Myspace page, in your blog or in a banner exchange you press the “Save banner” button. You will then be taken to the HTML code you need to use your banner, or if you like you can save the banner to your own computer and upload it to your own hosting account but more about that in a later tutorial.

Good luck creating your banners!

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New features

We’ve just done a few upgrades to the banner creator that we hope you will enjoy. The first one and the thing I think you will notice the most is the tool bar found inside the banner creator and the VIP area:

By holding your mouse pointer over the icons you get a short description of the function hidden behind the icons. We hope this will make it easier for you to find all functions in the banner creator.

In the VIP area where VIP members can access all their created banners we’ve also added similar icons. The icons can be found next to each saved banner and by clicking on them you can for example view HTML code for the specific banner, copy the banner to the banner creator or even visit the banner at ImageShack.us:

We’ve added a feature that was removed in the upgrade to version 4. It’s the “email this banner” function where you could email the banner to your friends (or to yourself). This function is (believe it or not) hidden behind the envelope icon found on most pages in the banner creator.

We’ve also done a few smaller changes in the code behind, but I think that may just bore you to death .

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