Everything Button

Voila, another tutorial! In this one I will walk you through how to get a snazzy button of your own. No thread required. And please note the pretty image; it was incredibly hard to find one that my font colors could be seen on.

~What They Are~

Buttons. They're not the kind shown in the picture above, so sorry :) They are pretty, custom squares that when you click them, boom, they take you to a blog. Mine is my sidebar and I hope you like it, because I'm going to show you how to make one exactly like it. Just not with my picture, please.

~Why You Should Have One~

Just like with Favicons, I find buttons are super handy. While they don't really round out your blog like Favicons do, they make your blog more accessible. Do you know how many of your internet friends have Favorite Blog pages? A lot. And they want a button to put there. So, if you have one, you're going to get more exposure as a blogger. That's always a good thing.

~How to Make One~

If you already have one, you don't have to read any further, but thanks anyway :)

I had no idea how to do this for a while. I knew I wanted a button, but I just never took the time to look it up. And then when Jonathan was parading his shiny new one, I realized that you click "Generate Your Button Code" underneath the button and follow the steps. It's that easy! So this tutorial will be for the buttons with the code that you steal. I don't know how to make or utilize the others yet :)

So have you clicked generate yet? Do so. This will launch the necessary website (www.mycoolrealm.com) in another tab. Go ahead and input your web name and path name, just like it wants.

Now I'm going to show you how to get your image URL.

Open Blogger and create a new post. Insert the picture you would like to use for button (again, I use PicMonkey for editing, etc). You will want the image to already be the desired dimensions- usually a square. Now, right click the picture and choose "open in link new tab."

The gobbledy-gook that appears in the search bar is your image's URL. Copy that and paste it into the code generator. Notice the string of random letters in the third line now? Yes, that's it.

So now, you get to customize. Click the "Help me find out" button for container type and use whatever it says to. I left every other option on its default, because I had customized my picture the way I wanted it previously. And go ahead with the representation. It's polite and handy for other bloggers. Then click preview. As long as it looks the way you want it to, go ahead and select "get code" and copy it.

Go back to Blogger, select your website, and go to Layout. I put my button in my sidebar, so add the HTML/Java Script gadget there. Paste your generated code that you copied and save.

Preview your blog to make sure it turned out the way you wanted it to. If not, go back and do the necessary customizations. If so, you're all set. Hit "Save arrangement" and you're done.

~~~~~

Hopefully all of that made sense. I want all of you to have shiny new buttons by the end of the week! Let me know if this was helpful and I'll walk you through any problems you have. Good luck!!