So yesterday, I decided it was time to get this blog rolling but I didn’t want to use just the regular headers that were available from wordpress. Not that they aren’t great, they are. And wordpress makes this process so turnkey, it’s amazing. But when I was tooling around the designs, I realized that some of the headers could be customized, so I decided to play a bit. And I was pretty proud of what I came up with considering the graphics tools I have to work with. It may not be perfect, but it is definitely more branded to me than what else was available.

I was so impressed with myself, I went ahead and redid my etsy store header too. You can check that one out here: irisandlily.etsy.com.

The neat thing here is how I made my header. It was really easy. I used images I had, Microsoft office Powerpoint (believe it or not…it’s a decent graphics tool in a pinch) and Snagit to capture my header, resize it and turn it into a jpg. You can find out more about Snagit here. I think they even give you a free two-week trial.

WordPress gives you the size you need (size varies depending on the design you choose) for your header image. For Etsy it’s 760 x 100 pixels, and here’s what you do. I had logo image already and some pretty graphics from an old site I used to have, plus a picture of one of the albums that I make. On a blank slide, I created a box in powerpoint and inserted the images, moving them around until I had them the way I wanted them. (Not that they are so awesome….but believe me, graphic design is way out of my league). The trickiest part was getting the little images to sit in front of the bigger images….here’s how you do that on Powerpoint. In the bottom left corner of the tool palette there is a DRAW function. Click on that and the top selection is Order. Click on that and it gives you the “Move to Back,” Move to Front commands. It only took me like 3 months to figure that out.

When I had this the way I wanted, I used Snagit to take a screen capture of just the part I wanted to turn into a header, resized and cropped it in that program and voila…..turned it into a header image that fit perfectly. So fun.

If you don’t have a logo, Powerpoint has a WordArt program that gives you the capability to turn plain words into…well, art. You can create a logo there too. I did that for an eBay store I had for a little while, see….. I created the logo with wordart, added the little bee guy (isn’t he cute?) and turned it into a jpg. Easy. I think you might be able to even do this in word too.

There are lots of you sellers on eBay who have opened stores. Even if you use eBay’s templates for your store design, you can really make your store your own with a simple logo like this, created with tools almost everyone has on their computers.

So on this blog, I’ll be talking about some of the ways I’ve sold my crafts online, even though I’m kinda a non-techy type. What’s so amazing about selling online is all the cool things you get to learn and have fun with. I’m off to Facebook next to create a page. I’ll let you know how that goes. If you’re a Facebook fan, watch for my IrisandLily page, coming soon!!

If you stumble across this post and you are wondering who the heck I am, check out my About page…. my craft is bookbinding.