Ten Second Widgets

I've been looking at tutorials on how to make widgets and I think My brain is about to burst. I thought I'd give you a tip on a SUPER EASY way to make a widget to link anywhere you want. You can add these to your blog, your website or your Artfire account. Any place that allows you to add a widget.

First you must join an image hosting site like photobucket.com or imageshack.us Search your own, but I trust photobucket. This site hosts images for you and give you HTML codes for them. Make sure the site is reliable, because if they are down, so is your widget.

Now pick an image for your widget. It should be fairly small. You can play with the size but most are around 120 to 200 pixels wide, but you might want a super big one, and you can. When I'm finished designing my images, I always use the save for web feature as this will give the best results. Also jpeg format is the most universally recognized, so I get in the habit of saving in jpeg.

Go to your host and upload your image. After you Upload you should see several different options for your image. You want to use the HTML code. It's easiest to work on this in a word processing program, but I work directly on the site I want to add the widget too. Take your code and past it where you want to work on your widget. You will see two URLs The first should be linking back to the host site and the second is linking back to your image. Just replace the host URL (should say href=) with the one you want to link your image to. Make sure you have your URL between the quote marks. Voila! Widget created.

You can test your widget here http://www.practiceboard.com/ It's a great place to see if you got your HTML right.