Today I’m tackeling a question from Lissa. She asked:

How do you make target links in the header – an example of what I mean is http://eightcrazy.blogspot.com/

Well Lissa, in the world of web design, there seems to always be 1000 ways to do the same thing. One person will use one method, while another person will use another. There are design standards, but within that, there is some freedom and flexibility.

I think from looking at eightcrazy‘s source code (btw, you know you can peek at someone’s source code by right-clicking on the page and selecting “view page source”, don’t you? Its super handy.) that she did a lot of template customization (and btw again…Shannon of Eight Crazy is a super talented designer and all-around cool gal! Check ‘er out.).

She probably started with a basic Blogger template and went into “Layout” and “Edit HTML” and tweaked to her heart’s content. My other guess is that she did what’s called “slicing” on her header when she created it in Photoshop. She divided her header into four sections, using a very clever design. (sorry Shannon…I hope I’m not giving away all your secrets!). Within Photoshop, there is a “slice” tool that divides your design into smaller pieces and creates images from them. In her HTML code, she arranged her slices, wrapped them in anchor tags ( <a href=”yoururl.html”> ) and thus created a full header.

Eightcrazy is a great example of what you can do with a little creativity and coding. Blogger offers a good starting point for people who just want to set up a basic blog and start writing. But there are also a lot of customization capabilities built in if you dig around a little bit. Here are a few resources I use when working with Blogger:

http://tips-for-new-bloggers.blogspot.com/

http://www.bloggertipsandtricks.com/

http://bloggerfordummies.blogspot.com/

Hope that answers your question, Lissa. Thank you, Shannon for providing today’s visual aid!