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Pro Blog Design

Advice for blog owners and designers on making a more attractive, usable and ultimately profitable blog.

How to Make Exciting Screenshots (In Photoshop or Gimp!)November 13

Have you seen screenshots on other blogs and wondered how they made something plain look so vivid and unique?

Engaging your readers with beautiful graphics isnʼt as hard as you might think! This tutorial will teach you how to create more eye-catching screenshots with just a few simple techniques.

From Michael: From last week's polls, I'm trying to work with more than just Photoshop in these tutorials now. All of the screenshots here are from Photoshop, but I've added instructions for finding all of the settings in GIMP as well.

Gimp is a free graphics package which Windows users can download here. Let me know if you use the Gimp help here please, so I know to keep it up.

1 - Screenshot Something

Take a screenshot of the web page, program, or document you want to show off.

Once youʼve done that, open the picture in Photoshop. For this example, Iʼve taken a screenshot of the web tool RSS Forward.

How to Make a Blogger Business Card in 5 Minutes (And Win 1000 free!)October 31

If you'd like to enter a draw to win one of 4 sets of 1000 free business cards from UPrinting.com, make sure you read down to the end of the post!

As bloggers we're used to doing all our networking and promotion online. None of us are likely to be taking out billboard advertising deals any time soon, but a business card is a cheap and easy way to network in the real world as well.

Why not hand one over the next time your cousin asks about your "web thing" again? Or that co-worker with the techy friends? Or the talkative guy beside you on the bus?

They could become your next diehard reader, and you never know who they might pass the card on to.

Design Your Own Card in 5 Minutes

Just like designing your own default avatar, a business card is deceptively easy to create.

Basics of Print Design

Designing for print is different to designing for the web. And I don't know a lot about designing for print... but thankfully

55 Premium WordPress Themes to Blow Your MindOctober 21

About a year ago, premium WordPress themes started appearing on the market. At the time, that meant themes that were a cut above the rest. But now it just means a theme with a price tag latched onto it.

There are still great premium themes out there, and well worth paying the money for. Unfortunately, there's also a lot that aren't worth paying the money for now.

With that in mind, we've searched through all the premium themes we could find to bring you our 55 favorites.

And lastly, there are no affiliate links here. So if we recommend a theme, we really do recommend it.

Wood World - $15   //  Demo  //  More Info

Should You Use a Photo as your Twitter Picture?October 7

Everyone seems to be on Twitter these days. Or on Plurk. Or Gravatar. Or MyBlogLog. Or Digg. Or Votetime. Or one of the million other social sites out there.

And all of those sites use an image on your profile. But what sort of image works best?

A photo of yourself? Or your logo? Or just a cool design?

Why Use A Photo?

• Much more personal. The idea behind sites like Twitter and Gravatar is to get closer to your readers; to form bonds and have a regular conversation with them. Using your photo is the easiest step towards making things more friendly, and simply put, more human.
• Anyone can do it. Not everyone is a designer, or has the money to hire one. But anyone can pull out a camera, snap a photo and upload it. If you don't think your logo

25 Ways to Spice Up Blog Post PhotosSeptember 29

Images enhance the visual impact of a blog and make it more likely a post will be read. One good photo can grab a reader's attention and drive them to the article.

A post without any graphs, drawing, or photos can look daunting. Even if it's well written, the wall of text might not appeal to anyone. A good image is often a must-have for a great post.

But sometimes the images available for publishing are poor quality, or just don't suit quite right.

With the tricks below, you can use Photoshop to fix up your images in minutes. Instead of a dull photo, you can liven it up to an image that might actually appeal to someone.

Strong Focus for Killer Portraits

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