Free Website Graphics Tools
Wednesday, August 19th, 2009
If you are trying to establish a presence online with your own website or product, you may know how costly it can be to get professional looking graphics and fonts created for you. Most people don’t want to spend large sums of money when first starting out to make money online. Since I remember how this feels, I wanted to share some sites I’ve come across, that I find are the best to help you create free web graphics.
Headers/Banners
It can be hard to get a good looking header for your site without spending some cash. But there is a new site called Instant Banner Creator, that can get you well on your way to making your own professional looking header or banner ad. It is free to join the site and there is a one time offer to upgrade for more templates. I made the image above in about three minutes.
You can create a complete header or get a pre-made template and add more images to it at puresilvabannermaker.com. Unfortunately, this site adds a small watermark to the corner of your images, unless you pay a small fee.
There is a site I really like for creating headers from scratch. You can upload your own background images and choose from hundreds of fonts for your design. The site is called bannersketch.com. This one is free too.
Image Effects
I started with just this small sample above to show you the general idea of some effects that can be done to an image. Much more impressive and dramatic effects can be achieved with a better stock photo.
Shadow Drop
Sometimes images on a site can look too flat and seem unreal. A good way to overcome this problem is with a drop shadow effect. You can make them for free at dropshadow.net This effect seems to make the image stand out more.
Reflection
Another way to help improve the look of your website images is with the reflection effect. Once again, you can find it for free at reflectionmaker.com.
Round Corners
If an image has square corners and is a dark color on a light background, it can look out of place. To soften the edges, you can use a dithering effect, or round the corners of the image. You can do the round cornering easily and for free at roundpic.com this site is good because you don’t need to embed a javascript code in your site to display the round corners.
Flash Animation
I came across this site and I couldn’t believe all the cool flash effects I could make including animations, movies, decorations and more. The site is a little hard to figure out at first, but it is really powerful and worth learning the methods of creating your own flash images. Go to effectgenerator.com and check it out.
Final Word
I did all these effects in just a couple minutes, with a small, poor quality image, but if you take some time to use these resources to their full potential, you will soon have a great looking site with top-quality graphics. Be sure to get your free membership to The Luxury Lifestyle for all the insider information you need to make money online.
Wishing you online success,
