Squidoo Design

   I intend to show you what you can do within the creative constraints of Squidoo. I, as a web site designer, am used to unlimited demands on my creativity when I am designing a web site. I can choose any color, any font, any pic - 1 column, 2 columns, 3 columns - I can do it all with regular web site design. But with Squidoo, you need to play by their rules. I always like to push the envelope, you could say, on what design rules I am willing to accept.

   My first lens was pretty boring. You've seen them all over Squidoo - black text on a white background. Yikes! That's not going to pique anyone's interest.

   So I started to look around and wondered how I was going to get my lens to stand out, being that I am a web site designer.

   Do a google search on anything, and a squidoo lens is bound to come up within the first or second page of results. That's right - google may rank a single web page higher than a web site filled with 20 pages of info.

   You can't just make a lens with a lot of links to all of your affiliates though, because, well, that's just not interesting.

   What is interesting is a well designed, informative lens that has the ability to get the visitor involved, actually moving things around. Sure, you can leave a comment in a blog, but can you move around a list of links on the blog!? You can do that with Squidoo. See below for more information.

I opened up Photoshop, and I created a space that was 490 pixels wide by 50 pixels in height. I knew that I wanted a decorative breaker in between a few of the paragraphs, to add some visual interest.

When I set the background color for the text, I noted that I set it to color #777777 - a medium grey. I filled my Photoshop file with the same color, so that the image would blend in with the rest of the text.

I then used a character font from Wingdings, using the pink color that stands out nicely from the grey. Saved it as a gif file.

I then opened up my handy web page development software (I work on a Mac and use Pagespinner) and created a new page. I inserted the code for displaying my image. I then needed to have a css file with the margins and padding set to 0. Here are the contents of my css file:

body
{
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
}

I then uploaded both my image.html and image.css to my server.

Replace the web site address listed with wherever your html file may be found.

That's it! It's an easy way to add images to your lens and control exactly where they are placed on Squidoo. Let me know if you have any questions!

Linda