How to make a BLOG BANNER tutorial

Your blog banner is such an important part of your blog. It is the first thing your readers (or new readers) see and should represent a little about what your blog is about! When I started my blog, I had no idea how to make a banner (or even how to edit pictures very well), so the top of my blog has change many times. I'm sure it will again {cause I'm indecisive like that}, but I have truly loved having my daughter be the first face I see when I pull up my site! I shared this tutorial on how to make a blog banner on Miss Information's blog as guest, and thought I'd share it with you lovely readers today! So, here how to make a blog banner {or at least how I make mine}.

I LOVE EDITING PHOTOS!! I am {just a little} obsessed with the things you can do with pictures!! The poster child for my blog is my beautiful little girl, Drew Bella. She is a bit of a ham and loves a photo-shoot!

I tend to use a couple of editing sites at a time, for the various features that they each offer. I haven't found (a free one) that I absolutely love everything about...but they all have great features together. The 3 that I use on a regular basis are Photobucket, Fotoflexer, and Picmonkey. Now, to get this picture to the size of my blog, I needed to crop it, NOT just resize it. Or it would look like this....

I know that the size I want it for my page is 995x320,  and I figured this out by following these steps

The width of my blog is 1240 pixels and I don't want the banner to be the entire width, so I am making the width of my picture 1000 (you can play with yours to find what you like best).

Now it is time to edit your photo (on any editing site that you like): I used photobucket for this part...     

            

Crop your photo: I cropped my photo so that it wouldn't be distorted. For this part, I uploaded the photo to Fotoflexer {because I love their fonts}

                           *note: you may have to resize your photo to a larger size if it isn't large enough originally   

 Now you can add any text that you want.....and tada

You have your banner!

To add it to your site...

I hope that this tutorial has been helpful! I'd be happy to answer any questions that you might have, or if I confused you in anyway :) Please feel free to contact me!!