The dependable calendar, clock, CPU meter, curreny converter, feed reader, maps and others are here to use.  Unlike Vista, they don’t open automatically after a fresh install, so you have to open them manually.  To access the gadgets,   type “desktop gadgets” on the search bar then click “Desktop Gadget Gallery” under the programs list:

The Desktop Gadgets Gallery will appear.  Click on any gadget that you want to run on your desktop:

The gadgets will appear at the right side of your desktop.  Clearing your desktop will not minimize the gadgets – they are always open unless you close them.

That basically covers how to add the gadgets to your desktop.  Now to add more gadgets to your gallery, you will need to download the installer from the URL below:

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/downloads/personalize?T1=tab03

Click the download button on any of the desktop gadgets to get the installer:

Once downloaded, open the file to run the installer:

You should see the new desktop added to the gallery.  Double click it to run on your desktop:

You should see it appear on your desktop.  Some of the gadgets are in fact pretty nice and add value to your Windows 7 experience (i.e. offers free downloadable contents like MP3s of unsigned artists).

As Windows 7’s production release gets nearer, we expect to see more awesome gadgets not only from Microsoft, but also from third party developers as well.

Ben Carigtan shows you how it’s done!

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The final output is a complete DHTML project complete with HTML, image files and JavaScript code – and those are done without any coding by hand.

1.) Create an image using the shape tool under the vector section (by default, the shape is set to rectangle). To view more images simply click on the small arrow beside the rectangular image, or simply press “U” to toggle the most commonly used shapes. Below is a screenshot of expanded shape tool.

2.) The shape we are going to create will act as a trigger for our swap image behavior later on. For now we will use a circle but you can use any shape or object as you prefer.

3.) After creating a shape on your canvas import a picture to be used for image swapping. Click on file then import, or press ctrl + r on your keyboard then browse for the desired picture.

4.) Your canvas should have a trigger button and image as discussed earlier. Next we create a new frame used for another image. Click New/Duplicate frame under the Frames and History panel.

5.) Select newly created frame and import another image. It is best that image on frame 1 and frame 2 has exactly the same absolute positioning on your canvas.

6.) Going back to frame 1. While the circle shape is selected, right click on it and insert a polygonal slice in it.

7.) Next create a rectangular slice for image 1 and image 2

Frame 1: Should look like image below

Frame 2:

8.) Select the circle image on frame 1 then right click on it and click Add swap image behavior:

9.) Upon clicking on add swap image behavior another window will appear, click on the rectangular slice we created earlier.

10.) Press F12 on your keyboard to preview it on your browser.  See the difference between the two screenshots below before and after hovering the mouse pointer on the circle.

Before hover:

During hover:

Adobe Fireworks is available from this URL: http://www.adobe.com/products/fireworks/

Ben Carigtan shows you how it’s done.

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A sample elastic page at default normal font size is below:

A liquid design on the other hand will produce a squeezed layout if you shorten the width of the browser:

The elastic layout on the other hand will retain its layout no matter what the width or height of the browser is.

Now that you see what it will look like, and behave I will show you how to create this using Adobe Dreamweaver.

Dreamweaver is one of my favorite web editing tools, it’s well defined templates lets users quickly create HTML frames and layouts.  To make an elastic page in Dreamweaver just create a new page and then click Blank Template > HTML template:

Choose any of the layouts with an elastic label.  A preview will appear on the right hand corner.  Click the create button to create the page:

The created page will appear in Dreamweaver’s editor:

I like how it creates the page with sample text data loaded on it.  This eases a designer’s visualization of the page during development.  It shows at once how a header will look like and how the paragraph elements will look once you put some real content in.

Ben Carigtan shows you how it’s done.

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After logging in,  click “add new article” to access the article editor page:

The article editor works like your standard email editor that you see in Yahoo! or Gmail.  It is a Web 2.0 application so you can edit on a what you see is what you get (WYSIWYG) manner.

You can work on the editor like how you work on a regular document editor.

For more advanced users, you can directly edit the HTML source code:

After editing the content you can publish it by selecting the published option then click save.  You may opt to put the article on the front page by selecting yes on the front page option.

If you need to remove the article, use the article manager to turn on/off the “published” and “front page” options:

The article manager also offers a lot of commands for content management.  We will cover the other commands on future posts so make sure to subscribe to our RSS feeds.

Joomla is an excellent platform for content management and its article manager page is the controller that drives all of its content.

Ben Carigtan shows you how it’s done.

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Joomla requires a PHP webserver and MySQL like the one packaged in XAMPP.  We have written about XAMPP and SQLyog to guide you with the installation of the required software.  The steps below will guide you with installing Joomla.

You can get the Joomla package from their official website: http://www.joomla.org/

Step 1. Start the Apache and MySQL services.  In XAMPP you will need to click the Start buttons next to each process:

Step 2.  Put the unzipped Joomla package on the htdocs folder of XAMPP. I have XAMPP installed on my C:\XAMPP directory so the Joomla folder goes to the C:\XAMPP\HTDOCS folder:

You can rename the Joomla folder to anything you want.  In my setup I renamed it to myJoomla.

Step 3. Browse the URL where Joomla is placed.  If you have it on your computer with folder named “myJoomla” the URL will be http://localhost/myJoomla. You should see the Joomla installer open on your web browser:

Step 4.  Follow the seven steps of the Joomla installer.  First step is the language so just choose the language that you want to use.  At the second step it is important that you meet the pre-installation check wherein a list of all minimum requirements need to be met:

Step 5.  Read carefully the license agreement, press next if you agree to the statements provided in the agreement.

Step 6.  Create a mySQL account that will be used by Joomla so it can save data to the MySQL database.   Enter the account details on the fields

Step 7. You will not need to enable the FTP settings on the FTP configuration screen.   This is not required on a Windows OS since you can directly alter the Joomla files using explorer.  If you use a secured web host, you should set an FTP account that can access the root directory.  You might need to get with the host admin to get the username and password if you want it to be a generic account separate from your user account.

Step 8. Enter the main configuration settings.  Enter your preferred site name, admin email and password:

Step 9. At this point you will get a hurdle with a message saying that you need to remove the installation directory:

Go to the Joomla directory and delete the “installation” sub-directory.  Only this directory needs to be removed so make sure not to touch the other files and directories. 

Step 10. Whew! You’re done! You now have your own Joomla website. If you used the same “myJoomla” folder name then the URL will be http://localhost/myJoomla/

Isn’t it a breeze to setup Joomla?  On the next posts we will talk about how to customize Joomla. 

Ben Carigtan show’s you how it’s done.

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BEFORE:

“But I must explain to you how all this mistaken idea of denouncing pleasure and praising pain was born and I will give you a complete account of the system, and expound the actual teachings of the great explorer of the truth, the master-builder of human happiness. No one rejects, dislikes, or avoids pleasure itself, because it is pleasure, but because those who do not know how to pursue pleasure rationally encounter consequences that are extremely painful.

Nor again is there anyone who loves or pursues or desires to obtain pain of itself, because it is pain, but because occasionally circumstances occur in which toil and pain can procure him some great pleasure. To take a trivial example, which of us ever undertakes laborious physical exercise, except to obtain some advantage from it? But who has any right to find fault with a man who chooses to enjoy a pleasure that has no annoying consequences, or one who avoids a pain that produces no resultant pleasure?”

AFTER:

Not only that the reformatted format is easier to read, it also maintains the width of the whole thing since you can set a table to occupy only a certain amount of pixels.  You can also set the distance of space between the columns to match your needs.  So how do we make such a table container? 

Simple, insert a table using your HTML editor.  Just make sure that you don’t put a value on the BORDER attribute so that the borders are invisible.  Let rows be equal to 1 and columns to 2.  You can change the rows and columns as you require.  In the screenshot below, I used Live Writer but it should be the same principle as in other web editors:

You can see above that I left the border blank and that makes it invisible. If you look at the code of the example table above, I used size 8 pixels of cellpadding and 5 pixels of cellspacing.  The border’s value is of course zero.

<table cellspacing="5" cellpadding="8" width="506" border="0">

.csharpcode, .csharpcode pre
{
font-size: small;
color: black;
font-family: consolas, “Courier New”, courier, monospace;
background-color: #ffffff;
/*white-space: pre;*/
}
.csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; }
.csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; }
.csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; }
.csharpcode .str { color: #006080; }
.csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; }
.csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; }
.csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; }
.csharpcode .html { color: #800000; }
.csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; }
.csharpcode .alt
{
background-color: #f4f4f4;
width: 100%;
margin: 0em;
}
.csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; }

Then after this, just paste the content inside the cells of the table. 

You will need to manually adjust the amount of text inside each cell to balance the amount of text on each one.  Adjust the table width, cellpadding and cellspacing parameter values as you desire.

That’s it! You should be able to apply the concept on invisible tables to handle columnar text displays with perfect alignment.  

Ben Carigtan shows you how it’s done!

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With this website creation tool you don’t have to install anything to write your own page – you can do them online anywhere as long as you are online.  Small offices who want to have their own Web space will also benefit since this is a good way to have a website with the least cost of ownership.

To start making your own website go to http://sites.google.com, you will need to have your own Google account to be able to access this site.  If you have an existing GMail account, that will work, you don’t have to make a new one.  After logging in, click Create site button to start the

The page creation form will appear.  Type in the specific details needed for your site.  You don’t have to follow the texts or themes I inputted below since this is customized per page:

The first entry is the site name.  This is like a title of your site so make sure it matches the purpose of your site:

Next comes the site description where you can add a short descriptive tag line or catch phrase for your site:

Turn on mature content warning if you plan to add nudity or contents not suitable for minors:

If you want to share the website to limited group then choose “Only people I specify can view this site”, else click “every on the the world can view this site”.

Then choose a design theme.  Pick a color scheme and pattern that matches your site description.  It should blend with the contents that you will later add to the site.

Finally, type in the secret captcha word to authenticate you as human.  This allows Google to prevent robots to spam the server with fake accounts:

NOTE: If the chosen URL is available it will direct you to the home page of the site, otherwise you will need to enter a new site name that is not yet taken.  In this case, “shadesofgreen” is already taken so I used “shadesofgreensite”:

From here you can start editing and adding the pages.  Click Edit page to start updating the main page:

You should see the online editor come up where you can put your content and save the changes you did:

At this page you can either save or cancel.  You can also create a new page to add more pages to your site.

Saving the file transfer you to the saved file’s location so you can see the changes that you did:

Users familiar with online blogging tools or MS Sharepoint will be right at home with this simplistic web site editing tool.  If you plan to have your own website, Google Sites is an exciting way get started with it.  It is easy to learn and you won’t have to worry about installing a web editor or managing your own web server since Google will host is for you.

Ben Carigtan writes about technology, websites, computers and how to get the best out of them.

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As you can see, it is a cool way to add interactivity to your site.  The idea is simple, the more frequent the word is used, the larger the size of the font used on the TagCrowd output.   So how do we create one?

First go to the TagCrowd website: http://www.tagcrowd.com/

enter your site’s URL, in this case I entered http://www.online-tech-tips.com.  You can also upload a plain text file or paste text on the big text box at the bottom.  This is helpful if your document is not yet online or you only want to get a TagCrowd output for a set of words.

After entering the URL, click Visualize! You should see something similar to output below:

To get the output’s HTML code, scroll down and copy the HTML code:

Paste the HTML code in your HTML document using your HTML editor.  You will need to switch to HTML mode if you are currently in WYSIWYG mode.

There are also parameters on the Options panel to adjust the output:

This is an interesting way to visually interpret a document, blog, poetry or anything with words on it.

Just for fun, here is this blog entry’s own TagCrowd output:

Ben Carigtan writes about technology, computers and how to get the most out of them.

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Over the last year or two we have seen a number of technologies and developments aimed at achieving this with varying levels of success.

Google Gears

Quite promising, Google released Gears just over a year ago with the concept of allowing web services to tap into the power of desktop software somewhat.

The release was met with interest, but not a great huge number of services have adopted the technology. Off the top of my head I can think only of MySpace and the new WordPress 2.6 release.

The premise was to allow offline access to popular web services and Google demonstrated the capabilities of Gears with their Online Docs office suite.

What’s interesting is that rather then using Gears for offline access, developers are seeing it as a great way to provide speedy navigation of frequently used services while online. WordPress is a good example, the new ‘Turbo’ function doesn’t let you blog offline, but it does make using the admin dashboard while online a whole lot faster.

Gears is powerful, but we are yet to see any kind of mass adoption, Google of course has been the biggest adopter so far, but perhaps services like MySpace and WordPress will encourage others to also adopt it.

Adobe AIR

Adobe AIR has been getting considerably more excitement from developers and a lot of very handy applications have been springing up lately.

Adobe AIR is a technology which lets developers do more then just bring their website and services onto the desktop, it lets them further extend their service in ways typically only desktop software was able to do before.

This means new interfaces, improved performance and more features. It’s also cross platform which is a huge incentive to develop using AIR. Adobe has tried to make it as accessible as possible for developers and AIR applications can be created with HTML and Ajax, Flex or Flash.

The Adobe Marketplace now has hundreds of applications and is worth checking out.

Mozilla Prism

To me Mozilla Prism seems a bit half-baked, but it does have a few distinct advantages to just using your normal browser.

Prism is designed so any user can create a desktop application of any of their favourite web services, however what you get is just a site specific browser window without all the toolbars etc.

The good thing about it however is that because it runs separately it won’t crash when your browser does. You can also have shortcuts within your start menu to open up the application, another handy feature.

I like some of the ideas of Prism but at the moment it seems more experimental.

What are your thoughts on this new single site browser concept? Would you use it or not? Enjoy!

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Well AIR applications are more then just fancy widgets, and more even then just web services outside of the browser. Instead they give developers the opportunity to provide the traditional power and flexibility of desktop applications to web services.

The advantages are attractive, cross-browser applications which have low system resources requirements and are quick to develop. The biggest issue seems to be the ease in which developers can push out low quality and unfinished products, however here are some of the best ones I have found:

1) EBay

I’m sure you’ve heard of this app before and for good reason. It’s one of the best showcases of how AIR can be used to extend the online service on the desktop, rather then simply replicating it. For any Ebay user it’s a must-have and with real-time countdowns for auctions, speedier and more intuitive navigation as well as graphical analysis of sales what’s not to love?

Twhirl

Of the dozens of Twitter clients Twhirl holds its own as a great social media aggregator and desktop repository for your tweets. Use multiple Twitter and FriendFeed accounts as well as posting status updates to Pownce and Jaiku. Check out some of the other integrated services at the official site.

Guitar Scales V2

You may not play guitar but I couldn’t help putting this app in this list. It’s so simple but useful and you’ll love it. Find any scales from a whole variety of options. Has a very nice interface as well. Incidentally it’s very hard to find this functionality available elsewhere for free.

4) Klok

A time tracking utility. Work out how to best use it and increase your productivity but tracking exactly what you are working on for whom and for when. Some nice touches like exporting to excel and a mini-view to keep it out the way while working but still quickly accessible.

5) Xdrive Desktop Lite

If you’re still waiting for your invitation for Live Mesh then maybe till then try Xdrive Lite. You’ll need an Xdrive account, but after registering you can use the AIR app to directly upload files to your 5 gigabyte online hard drive. Sure beats navigating your way through a web interface.

6) ReadAIR

A nice in-progress version of Google Reader for the desktop. Still a lot of work to be done including keyboard shortcuts and offline access, but quite usable at the moment. Has the Mac OSX theme, so if you don’t like that then maybe try later when more are added.

7) Snackr

A lot of people have been saying how great this is lately, but I wasn’t convinced until I actually tried it myself. All Snackr does is scroll random posts from your feeds across your desktop (with thumbnails) but is surprisingly useful and has a great interface. I would very much recommend trying it before you dismiss it.

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If you’re one of the many people who create web sites in Photoshop, you might be interested in a free online service that will let you convert your Photoshop design into a strict XHTML compliant CSS web site!

Trying to understand and code a CSS website can be a difficult and arduous task (thanks to Microsoft and there four versions of IE in the market!). It’s much easier, at least for me, to play around in Photoshop and create simple yet cool-looking designs.

PSD2CSSOnline is completely free and allows you to upload files in either Photoshop or GIMP, so if you don’t have a copy of Photoshop, you can use the free open-source photo-editing program, the GIMP.

When creating your web site design, you need to make sure you use layers as this is what PSD2CSSOnline reads to figure out the different parts of a web page. The trick is to keep the parts of your page that you want separate in different layers of your .PSD file.

There are a couple of simple guidelines you should follow in order for this process to work.

• Don’t make a bunch of layers – If you are an advanced Photoshop user, you might have created many layers that all combine together to make a single object. For example, your logo might actually be made of 5 to 6 different layers – but the logo is still one object. Do not upload the file with the logo still separated out into the 5 or 6 layers – merge them together into one single “logo” layer.
• Opacity and Blending Options – You need to rasterize any layer with opacity at anything other than 100%. In Photoshop, you can rasterize a layer by right-clicking on the layer and choosing “Rasterize Type” or “Rasterize Layer“. In the Gimp, create an empty layer just below the one you want to rasterize and then right click on the new layer and choose “Merge Down”. This will rasterize the layer and merge it.
• Modify Gimp Layer Sizes – For some reason the Gimp likes to make layers the same size as the image. This makes inefficient as you end up with lots of big image files in your web page. For any layer in the Gimp where the object is smaller than the whole page (most of your layers), click on the layer, then in the layer menu choose “Autocrop Layer”.
• 4MB PSD File Size Limit – This is the largest file size that you can upload, but it was just a random number picked by the creator. You can email him and he’ll let increase the limit!

That’s all you need to keep in mind! Go ahead and create your web page in Photoshop or GIMP and then upload it to see how it turns out!

Hopefully, the look you had created comes out in your final HTML output. You can also try out a couple of other online services for converting PSD designs to web pages, but they are not free:

http://psd2css.com/

http://www.xhtml4u.com/

http://www.psdslicing.com/

http://www.htmlblender.com/

This service is also called PSD slicing, if you want to know the technical term for it. If you don’t feel like paying people to do this slicing for you and PSD2CSSOnline didn’t work out for your complicated design, you can do the slicing yourself!

Here are some cool tutorials and guides that you can read on how to design a site in Photoshop and then convert it into HTML:

http://www.sitepoint.com/article/design-website-photoshop

http://www.entheosweb.com/photoshop/layout.asp

While PSD2CSSOnline may not be the best tool for big designers, it’s a great way to get started if you’re not very familiar with CSS and HTML coding. And it’s free, so it’s always worth a shot! Enjoy! Source: ToThePC

[tags]websites to photoshop, psd to css, psd2cssonline, photoshop to website, convert psd to css, psd to xhtml css, psd to css tutorial[/tags]

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Earlier I had written about a cool web site called BrowserShots, which basically lets you view what your webpage will look like in about 20 different combinations of browsers and versions. It’s a great tool, but there are many times when you want to interact with a site on each browser in case you’re using Javascript, flash, or other types of code.

Luckily, there is a freeware application from TredoSoft that makes it possible to run different versions of IE, all the way from 3.0 to 7.0 at the same time! Now that is cool! Basically, it uses some sort of hack found in 2003 that uses DLL redirection.

Once you download it, you’ll get the option to select which versions of IE you want to install, including IE3, IE 4.01, IE5, IE5.5, and IE6.

Unfortunately, the installer will only work on Windows XP, it’s not meant for Windows 2000. Anyway, after it is installed, you’ll see the shortcuts conveniently created in your Quick Launch bar.

So what about IE 7 you may be asking? Well there is a way to install IE7 in what is called “standalone” mode, which means it won’t interfere with the other versions on IE already installed. You can on how to do that here. This way, you can test your web site in IE 3 to IE 7. These guys seem to be pretty active, so hopefully they will be able to get IE8 to work as well once it’s out of beta.

And that’s it. You should now be able to open all the different versions of IE up at the same time on the same computer!

IE3:

IE4:

IE5:

IE6:

Overall, it’s a great program slapped together by some guys who saw a need that had not been filled. It may not work perfectly all the time (IE might crash somtimes), but it’s definitely worth throwing on a test box if you’re a full time web designer, blog designer, Javascript programmer, etc. Enjoy!

[tags]browser compatability, cross browser compatability, browser compatibility test, install multiple versions of ie, installing multiple versions of ie, multiple ie installs[/tags]

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Here’s a list of free tools you should definitely check out to make sure that your website is running at an acceptable level compared to your fellow bloggers. If your site is not running optimally, then you’re probably not getting the your full potential of traffic.

1. Website Grader – I wrote about Website Grader a few months back as a free search engine optimization tool that you should be using if you’re a webmaster. Website Grader will give you a report of many aspects of your site and a final grade out of 100. When I first ran it on my site, I was at 56, now I’m up to 98. And my traffic has gone from 100 visits a day to 5000. I’m not saying it’s because of Website Grader, but it helped me determine problem areas.

2. Xinu Returns - Another web site I had written about a couple of months back that lets you quickly check things like your pagerank, rating, backlinks, and indexed pages. It’s a great tool to get a quick overview of your the status of your site in the blogosphere. It also gives you tips for your title tags and meta keywords.

3. BrowserShots – This site is really awesome for webmasters. You type in your web address and then choose all of the browsers and OSs that you would like to see your website shown in. You can see how your web site looks on Linux, Windows or Mac and in all of the different browsers, including Firefox, IE, Safari, and Opera. You can also choose the screen size, color depth, etc. Really great tool.

4. YSlow – YSlow is a Firefox only addon, but it is an amazing tool for analyzing a website in terms of performance and speed. It checks 13 different factors for a web page and generates a final score for the site. It also lists out the improvements that need to be made to ensure the highest possible grade. I wrote two articles on YSlow, one about how it helped me reduce the load time of my site by 50% and another on how to setup YSlow. Make sure to read them and install Firefox just for this purpose.

5. WebSiteOptmization – Another tool you can use that is similar to YSlow, but no need for Firefox. It gives you a breakdown of various aspects of your site, including HTTP requests, DNS lookups, etc and gives you recommendations on how to make it load faster, etc.

6. BuiltWith – BuiltWith is a very cool site that creates a profile of your website based on what technologies your site is running on. This site really focuses on the actual technologies that your site is built with, i.e. PHP, Apache server, Google Analytics, etc. It also gives you a score out of 5 stars depending on how good those technologies are. Microsoft.com has a rating of 2/5! IIS sucks!

7. CSS Optimizer - Just about every website uses CSS in some way or another and each call to a CSS file takes time to download. If you can shrink the size of your CSS files, even by a little bit, you’ll save a lot of time on page loading. You can also go to the W3C CSS Validation site to make sure your CSS is valid.

8. Minify – A very powerful tool that will take your JavaScript and CSS files and combine them together and remove all unnecessary comments and whitespace. I have used this tool before to reduce the size of my Javascript files by almost 40%. You can imagine the savings in load time because of that, especially if you use Wordpress where each plugin usually has it’s own Javascript file.

Going through these websites for a few hours and really analyzing your website will help you improve the overall user experience with your website. I learned many things that from these sites that would have been impossible for me to figure out myself. Enjoy!

[tags]seo tools, free seo tools, optimize website, optimize your website, free website optimization, analyze website, free website analysis, website content analysis, analyze a website[/tags]

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Who is Hosting This? is a very simple web service whose sole purpose is to tell you the company that is hosting a website. I really like this because most of the other online web site checking tools simply do not give a clear and concise answer to this very simple question.

I came across this website because I’m looking for better hosting, but I wanted to know what hosting companies very large sites in my field were using, such as LifeHacker.com, ReadWriteWeb, HowToGeek, etc. I know those sites run smoothly and have millions of visitors every month, so if there hosting can handle that traffic, I would be more inclined to go with one of those hosting companies.

Once you type in a domain name, for example, online-tech-tips.com, you’ll get your answer right away:

And the answer was BlueHost, which is absolutely correct! My web hosting company is BlueHost. I’ve tried it on a good number of sites and the results have been correct each time. Only gigantic sites like Google.com, etc will not give you any useful information because they have their own IP address ranges and use their own servers. You’ll also see this for other companies like CNET, etc because they manage all of their own hosting.

So next time you want to find out who hosts a website, make sure to check out this nifty little tool! Enjoy!

[tags]find who hosts a website, find out who hosts a website, find my website host[/tags]

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However, one site that I just ran across called LogoMaker, allows you to create your own personalized custom logo for a web site or business and use it online for free! The cool thing about this web site is that you can design a logo and use it on a personal web site or blog without paying anything. Of course, there’s a catch!

Once designed, you will be able to copy and paste a line of HTML code onto your site that will display your logo from their web site. If you want to download the logo in JPG, PNG, or any other image format and use it on business cards, letters or for any other business purpose, you have to pay $49. However, if you have a really small site or a simple blog, having them host your logo may be perfectly fine! If not, it’s only $49 to make it completely yours.

The design process is extremely easy and basically involves four steps:

1. Choose your industry – To narrow down the images for the second step, you need to choose which industry you are in and you’ll get icons that are related to that field.

Next, you need to choose your icon from one of three types: Symbol based, letter based, or abstract based icons. LogoMaker has over 10,000 professionally-made icons to choose from in their database.

2. Design the Layout – You can now add text to your image, pick from over 200 or more fonts, and change the size, color and orientation of any object in the design window.

3. Save Logo - Once you’re done designing your logo, click Save Logo and create a new account.

4. Buy, modify, download, or use free logo code – Finally, you can either purchase the logo if you want to download it as a file or use it on other business materials or you can click on the Free Web Logo button and copy the IMG code for the logo.

Simply copy and paste the code anywhere on your web page or site to begin using it. You can use the logo for free as long as you want and on as many pages or sites as you want, there are no restrictions for using it online.

Lastly and probably the coolest feature of the site is the Ask A Friend option. They must have realized that when most people design their own logos, they like to get input from other people, such as family or friends before they finalize a design. The Ask A Friend feature allows you to email your logo to others and get their input and ideas for any changes they might suggest for your logo.

LogoMaker is a pretty cool logo creation and designing service that works well for small businesses, individuals , or blogs. Check it out! I think I’ll be creating one very soon!

[tags]create your own logo free, design your own logo, free logo designs, logo creating, logo design, online logo design, custom logos[/tags]

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