Hi
I want to create a personal banner for my own blog
i want to create something simple

how do i do this
do i need any software

please
help

You can use photoshop. It's a great tool for banners.

oh i dont have photoshop
i have open office draw
picasso

There is a site that has a Photoshop type application that you can download for free.

I use the PHOTOPLUS. I have Photoshop but I pefer to use the Photoplus because it is just as powerful, yet easier to use.

It is available at FreeSerifSoftware - free software downloads

I usually open up photos with this applicaton and then you can clone it, posterize it, erase backgrounds, cut and paste parts of the photo. Combine many photos into one, etc. You can use the text option for phrases, etc.

Or you can create a graphic image in Photoplus, save it as a jpg file and then open up Microsoft Word and insert your .jpg image. There's an option in Microsoft Word where you can type over images. That gives you more font and color options to play with.

In Photoplus, let's say you want a 2 inch by 6 inch banner. You can specify CANVAS size as being 2 x 6. Then specify image (photo) size as being 2 x 2. You can then move your image around on the banner and have 4 inches to play around with on the white space.

Just like photoshop, you also can create funky effects with an image. (posterize, solarize, twirl,) Some of these change photos into cartoon like images.

is webplus of any use?

I have Frontpage so I don't use Webplus regularly. I did try it out and it works fine, just like Frontpage. It is WISYWIG (What you see is what you get). So, you can use TABLES to break your page into sections, create banners, insert and resize your images and WEBPLUS will create the HTML code that you can upload to your web site.

By the way, if you don't have FTP on your computer, you can load your web site directly from the internet. There's a site called web2ftp. (FTP) As long as you have your domain name and your password you can load, delete and check your web site without having to load it directly from Frontpage.

But WEBPLUS does create clean HTML code. Microsoft Word has an option to save in web page format. But you can't mix and match. You can't mix HTML saved in Microsoft Word with HTML saved in Frontpage or WEBPLUS.

If you don't have Frontpage, use WEBPLUS (I guess this was a wordy post to say that, huh?)

That free site also has a graphic package that works almost like QuarkExpress. You can bend and twist circles and squares and bend letters and numbers to create funky effects that you save as a .jpg and insert into your web site.

I JUST CHECKED THE FREE FTP SITE. THEY HAVE DISACTIVATED IT BECAUSE SPAMMERS HAVE BEEN USING IT. THEY ARE TRYING TO ADD MORE SECURITY FEATURES.