Ways to Make a Header

[candygourlay]

What is a header? It's the strip of graphic one usually finds across the top of a web page. The header is a way of branding your page and clearly marking out what your web page wants to do. You can use it to promote yourself and your work. If you have recently published a book, it 's a good idea to put an image of your book in your header.

On the Ning, the header size is specified as 955 pixels. If you make it bigger it won't fit. Also, because this is the web and the resolution of your images can dictate how quickly your page will load, you need to be able to keep your resolution down to about 72 dpi (dots per inch). Also, the Ning provides a limited amount of storage for images and if everybody uploaded their images, we might overstep our limit.

What to do?

The best way to do this is to use Photobucket.com, a free service for storing and manipulating images. Photobucket also hosts the images. This means, the images live on Photobucket's server, not the Ning's and so relieves the pressure on our Ning server allowance.

Create an account on Photobucket.com - this is free. You then upload your photos and using the fairly intuitive interface of Photobucket, crop, rotate, resize your images. If you need to add text, you might have to do so using some other software (but that's another story) then upload it to Photobucket again.

When you are uploading photos, Ning gives you the option to provide a url instead of browsing to the file on your computer.

Note: if you click 'options' Ning gives you more ways to style the image.

Photobucket then supplies you with the url (that's a web address - something like http://photobucket.com/yourphoto_is_here.jpg).

If you want to add, say, images of your books, or your author photo to your About Me or to the text interface of the Ning, you can use the Photobucket url.

Remember : you have to resize the image to exactly the size you want it to appear as ... as a rule of thumb, the middle panel with the text is about 400pixels wide).

At the moment, when you add photos to the Ning using the photo album your photos are added to a soup of everyone else's images. This way, you keep your images separate and can style it to your liking ... I'll get round to posting on how to do this someday.

[candygourlay]

when you hover over a picture in your photobucket album a window appears with:

IMGname.jpg
Email and IM
Direct Link
HTML Code
IMG Code

copy the 'html' code and paste into 'Or insert an existing image' on the Ning (but make sure you've resized it first!)

[candygourlay]

photobucket allows you to crop or resize an image to fit the parameters set for the header. it.also gives you the url for the image.

[Jackie Marchant]

Well, I uploaded an image on to photobucket - but how do I put the image into my header?