Vital Pixel

How to Make Userbars

*Written by Pyost*

I decided to put this tutorial on here, partly because this blog does have a graphics section, haha, and also because they are a great way to get backlinks, and increase the link’s visibility.  I myself could probably make a very novice userbar, but Pyost’s tutorial is great.

Lately userbars have become very popular with people. They are mostly putting them in their forum signatures, which is very practical. They are small, but can be used for linking.

A lot of userbars can be found at www.userbars.com and www.userbars.org, but sometimes people can’t find exactly what they want. This is why I have decided to make a tutorial on how to make you own userbar.

The pictures in this tutorial are made in Photoshop 6.0, so don’t be surprised if you’re Photoshop is different. I will be making a Thunderbird userbar.

First of all, you have to create a new picture. The dimensions are as shown in the picture below.

Next, you must choose you background color. It is best to use the gradient tool and the colors that would suit the thing you are making a bar for. In this case, I will be using a light blue color going to white (because of the Thunderbird logo).

It should look like this.

Now, we must add the diagonal lines seen in all the userbars. To do this, create a new picture, dimensions 6×6 pixels and transparent. Next, use the pencil tool on that picture to create a diagonal line like this.

When you draw that, go to Edit -> Define Pattern and choose the pattern name. Now go back to the first picture and the Pattern Stamp Tool in order to put lines into you picture. Since the lines are too bold, I would advise you to lower the opacity. I use 15% myself, but it’s up to you to decide. After doing that, you get something like this.

Now it’s time to add the logo to the picture. The logo must have transparent background, so when you put it it should look like this.

Now we’ve got only two things left. The first one is to add text to the userbar. For this, most people use the Visitor -BRK- font. That’s what I’m going to use, too. When you choose the font tool, choose Palettes and do the following. Set the font size to 10pt, turn of anti aliasing, and increase the character spacing to 25. When you write the text, use the stroke option to create a black or white 1 pixel border, depending on the font color. Here’s what you should get.

Then, you should add the elliptic transparent white part. In order to do that, choose the Ellipse Tool, select Create Filled Region and set the opacity to 30% or less to get the best quality. Create a new ellipse with this tool so that it’s bottom part is located in the top of the picture.

The final thing to do is to add a 1 pixel border to the whole picture, and do it with around 20% opacity. I hope that there is no need to explain this. And here is the product – Thunderbird userbar.

If you have any further questions or want to comment my tutorial, you are free to do so.

Why wordcloud links are useless (user article)

This is an article someone on DP wrote… I thought I would post it here, but I can’t take credit for it.

As I browse through the forum, I keep coming across these word cloud sites and I just don’t understand why people continue to spend money on worthless links. I won’t even get into the fact that the value of your link is diluted to almost nothing and that the page is completely unrelated. Rather, I will use basic logic to show you why word cloud sites make no sense from a financial perspective.

There are 2 basic facts:

1. The word cloud site owner is limited to how many links he/she can sell…if there are 100 links spots for sale, once they are gone, that’s it (unless you add additional word cloud pages)

2. Assuming the price per link remains the same (which it usually is), the word cloud owner is now limited by the total amount of money they can make.

I will use the last site I came across as an example. Here are the specifics:

1. PR4
2. $0.75 per link
3. 500 links spaces

Using simple arithmetic, the total amount of money this word cloud site owner can make is $375…and that’s assuming that all links are sold. But how often is that the case? So let’s assume that they are able to sell 70% of the links on their page (which is optimistic). This would lower that number to about $265 in total profit that can be made from the site.

Now let’s take a look the costs:

1. Domain Name Registration: $8
2. PR4 Domain: $30 (depending on age)

With the free scripts out there, this would bring initial costs to about $40…and promotion/link building is not even a factor.

As we factor in this cost into the total amount to be made from the word cloud site…it leaves a total of $225 to be made. Now I ask you…how much time/money do you think will be spent to promote the site in the long run? Will they buy links to increase the value of the page? Will the domain be renewed for 3 more years? All this costs money.

Let’s say that all links are sold…now what? Since there is no money left to be made from the site, there is no reason for the owner to continue spending money on the site.

You’re probably thinking…it’s only a dollar. Ok, that’s fine. I can set up a page and you can donate a dollar to me….you’ll get the same value out of that and I can take my girlfriend out for Sushi more often.

Anyways…just wanted to share my opinion.