Chiclet - How to build small buttons for your Blog

What are these things good for? Anything?

Sure they are! Just give them a chance.

• They are much more pleasing to the eye. The graphic naturally draws the eye a lot more effectively than a wall of blue hyperlinks.
• They can show your affiliations. I've seen people with chiclet blocks that include their school, job, organizations, and basically anything that they support. They are a great mosaic of a person.
• They help your networking voice. It is much easier to market a blog or other site if you have a chiclet for your client/customer/reader to add to their content. Links are boring, but if someone asks me to add their chiclet to my site when I use their service, I almost always do.

How to Make em

A couple of different approaches to chiclets.

1. Build the graphic. You can always create your own button using Photoshop or other image editing software. However, if you are fully fluent in that software, I probably don't need to teach you how to make chiclets :). I would recommend going to the Blog Flux Button Maker or one of the others in the link list and following the simple steps to make your image.
2. Save this graphic that the button maker produces to your computer. Don't forget where you put it!
3. Upload your picture to the web. If you don't own your own web space, you can always take advantage of Picasa (a Google Pack Software) to host your pics online.
4. Create some HTML code. Super Easy I promise!
   
   Use the following Structure:
   
   <a href="http://www.grumpstump.com/"
   target="_blank" title="Mouseover Words">
   <img src="http://www.grumpstump.com/the-grumpstump.gif"
   alt="Alternative Name" /></a>
   
   Where the first web address is where your chiclet is linking to
   
   "Mouseover Words" are the words that will appear when you mouse over the chiclet (not required but it is supposed to help with SEO)
   
   The second web address is the location of your chiclet graphic. Find your graphic where you have posted it on the internet and copy whatever is in the address bar of your internet browser into this line.
   
   Alternate Name is what will be displayed if your graphic can not be found.
5. That's it! you are done! Copy and Paste your new chiclet code into whatever webpage you would like it to appear in. Tell your friends! You now have a logo instead of a link!