LAST EDITED ON Oct-09-07 AT 08:26 PM (PST)
 
This thread is dedicated to modifying banners and headers using the FREE graphics program GIMP and XARA.

Download GIMP here:
http://gimp-win.sourceforge.net/stable.html

Note: You'll also need GTK+ 2 Runtime Environment...If you don't have it installed, you can download it from the same link above.

This forum and this thread are NOT intended to teach you extreme graphics...Instead, what we'll focus on is modifying existing headers and banners and creating basic headers using the most simple techniques possible that still give us good, professional results.

If your sites and pages are NOT getting traffic, or even better, making money, then your focus should be on marketing, not "decoration"...However, having a decent looking site is part of making money and can help you as you apply for affiliate programs, etc.

We won't get into making fancy buttons, either. Text links are not only faster and easier, they are BETTER for SEO.

Again, our goal is to make quick, decent and clean graphics for our pages. Nothing more. Nothing less.

Kurt's Quick Tips:

Your graphics should only be in either of two formats: .gif or .jpeg. Other graphic formats can't be seen in web browsers.

Your graphics should have a DPI (dots per inch) of 72 DPI. This is called "low resolution". The reason is, computer monitors only displays 72 dots per inch, so anything above 72 dots is a waste of bandwidth and time.

If you made your web graphics of a higher quality, it still wouldn't matter, as monitors won't show it. In this case, all you're doing is increasing the size of your image, which in turn takes more bandwidth and causes your images to take longer to load, all without any benefit.

(The higher resolutions are for printing.)