How To Make Good Headers
 

Anyone have any good tutorials or tips for making good custom headers for freesites? Any tips, tutorials, or suggestions are appreciated.

Oh come on guys...I know someone out there has a tip or two...

I have no idea what you mean by "headers" |huh

Do you mean the stuff in here or the top 20% (or whatever) of your webpage on display?

Don't..

I see yards of space wasted on free site headers.. Put in the site title and then get an ad in there.

DD

I mean the graphics that go across the top of the header portion of the freesite to make it look more professional, like with a fancy graphic...I've seen a few here and there that look pretty cool...but running through a few link lists for examples, everything was mostly just the title...I'll stick with that...thanks everyone...

making "headers" on a freesite is kinda a waste of time. I know because i used to make simple graphics for my freesites i probally spent more time making the graphics than making the site. but photoshop is one of my favorite simple graphics program. I prefer jasc animation shop for the animated graphics. sometimes i will make my images in photoshop then put them togather in jasc. ive also found the corel programs to be useful to. you can always make some graphics for your hubs just for practice.

That's exactly what I meant...

Supposedly.... - "it looks professional" - , but has anyone said/quoted/statistically proven that they sell more?

Don't fall into traps of doing things just because they look good or someone else does it(eg: category recips :D)

Concentrate on making the sale.. not feeling good about your site :)

DD

I wouldn't say making headers is a waste of time. They probably won't bring you any more sales, but it does help keep your designs fresh.

To answer easymama's original question, the scope of creating catchy graphics is just too big to give simple recommendations beyond really learning your software. If you know Photoshop there's nothing you can't do.

Just to give an example, this is about as complicated as I personally would ever go. If you know layers, masking and how to slice an image it isn't difficult at all with a little practice. Most of the time I just use a simple text graphic for the title or just plain text.

I wonder how search engines look at this. Would a text header with [H1] tags be better than an image? I've been using image headers for quite sometime, and maybe it's time to re-think.

From what I understand SE's ignore images. Text is always better in the eyes of SE's.

Make sure you use good alt text in your img tags.

Also, if you're comfortable with CSS, you could apply things like visibility, absolute positioning, and z-index values to your first H1 tag and header graphic to have your cake and eat it too. In other words you can position the H1 text (invisibly or not) behind your header graphic, so the graphic is all the surfer sees but the H1 text is still right there at the top of the page.

But mostly I agree with Danger Dave about making sure you know why you want to spend time making header graphics.

Thanks guys...I appreciate the feedback...I've been studying this and I think with css I can make some good looking header type abstract enhancements to my freesites...I'll be working on it...thanks...