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Guide to Blogging Sports Events

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One of the easiest niches to get into is sports – it’s a market with the perfect ingredients for a blog. You have:

  • Fanatic demand (sports fans are crazy, emotional, opinionated and active community members).
  • Low competition (most fan blogs are – in my view, crap. The sports industry as a whole is crying out for quality fan-produced content, and that’s where you come in. To add to that, there is very little being done in the search marketing space with sports blogs – I know this from personal experience).
  • You have a lot of opportunities to earn money from this niche, provided that you are creative (selling affiliate goods directly will not work for example, as sports fans are exactly floating in money all the time).

So, with one eye on the 2006 Fifa World Cup (that’s soccer to you Americans), let’s talk about what you need to in order to blog about a sporting event.

Create a Timeline

Obvious as it may seem, you can get a lot of benefit out of creating a timeline for the event and breaking it down into distinct sections. Once you have the event divided up into sections in time, you have a much better idea of what stages your coverage will go through. You will also be setting separate goals and objectives for each of these stages, but not yet.

First, you need to find your focus.

>Pick your Theme

Pick a theme for your coverage. Do you have a favorite team (team sports) or a favorite athlete (individual sports)? If it is a multi-sport event, pick your favorite event(s). In simple terms, pick out a few specific, identifiable themes from the event that you are interested in (or barring interest, you think would be the most interesting for your readers).

This will help you find your primary focus for your event coverage. Throughout the sports event, it is going to be very tempting to try to cover all the news – using these themes, you can reorient yourself and focus on only that in which you are truly interested. For the rest, you can setup a daily ‘links’ or ‘briefs’ post in which cover all the interesting news that you did not have time to cover.

Set Goals

Set specific goals for the event, with respect to the following:

  • Individual themes
  • Each ‘stage’ of the event
  • The ‘big picture’ / overview of the event
  • On creating interest in your coverage of the event

It is important that you set yourself these goals – they will keep you on track as well as keep you motivated throughout the event. At the very least, this is going to be a heavy period of blogging, so you should also think about your other responsibilities. In my case I have delayed projects and taken time off from most of my other blogs in order to immerse myself fully on covering the World Cup.

Execute

I’ve said this before, and Nick and Chris have said it time and time again:

To be successful, you have to be able to execute on your plans. This meets meeting your goals, not only for each stage of the event but also for the themes you have picked (the focal points for your blog).

If you do something like this, and if you plan on covering it properly (that is, following news and actually providing timely updates instead of putting up a “all-links-lumped-together” post at the end of each day, then this will take a lot of time and effort. For me, the World Cup has not even begun yet and I’ve already spent two full days working on my football blog (albeit half of that time was spent redesigning it).

Make the best of your resources to “get the job done”. It will pay off in spades by the end.

Create Interest

Make a list of 4 to 5 different things you can do (other than just blogging about the event) that will generate interest in your readers. If you are programming-inclined you could put together a scoreboard widget (like Microsoft did for the World Cup). If you are a designer you could put together a new design for your blog specially in anticipation for the event (something that I did for my football blog).

There’s a lot more you can do – podcasts, picture galleries, strong opinionated content and more, but the key here is what I said earlier regarding execution: you have to be able to carry out your plans fully. It’s no use setting yourself lofty goals if you cannot keep up with them. Work hard, but remember your limits.

Sports Blogs

It really, really helps if you have a team of bloggers. They can share the blogging load, contribute in different ways (images, programming, etc) and best of all, it always helps to have alternate opinions on a blog.

If you’re going solo, then good luck. You’ll bloody well need it.

This post is actually inspired by another post I wrote on blogging elsewhere. In it I’ve shown exactly what goals I’ve set for myself (and the blog) for the World Cup and how I plan to accomplish them. If you are interested, here’s the link: blogging about the World Cup.

HOWTO: Bug Check Your Blog

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Sometimes it can be really difficult to track down bugs that cause your blog to display improperly? especially when the issue is not something you did in your template, but a mistake or typo in an actual post or TypeList.

The other day a question came in via comment on the FAQ page. Richard Murray was experiencing an issue that caused the text size in his blog to display larger in Internet Explorer than in other browsers. Oddly, when I viewed the blog in IE, I wasn’t able to replicate the issue. Bud suggested that it might be related to using keyword font sizing rather than specifying font sizes in pixels (MT uses keywords such as xx-small, x-small, small, medium, large, x-large, and xx-large to describe font sizes and IE doesn’t respond well to these). But although that was a good guess, it wasn’t the answer either.

In the end, it turned out to be a pretty simple problem: an open tag in Rich’s code was causing all the text after the tag to display larger. I had a similar problem once when I failed to close a bold tag in a TypeList. The entire blog displayed in bold text until I figured it out, making it very difficult to read. This kind of error can be difficult to trouble-shoot. After all, one wouldn’t expect a typo in a TypeList to effect the display of an entire blog. I spent a lot of time digging around in my templates before figuring out where the problem was.

That’s why it’s a good idea not only to view your blog in all the major browsers, but to periodically run your site through an HTML validator. Here’s a list of resources you can use to make sure that your blog will display properly on all platforms and in all browsers.

Checking your template and page code:

The first two links here are services that you definitely should run your blog through every now and then to make sure it’s functioning properly for all your readers. I especially recommend using these after implementing any new hacks on your blog’s template code.

browsershots.org: This is a great service that allows you to view screenshots of your pages in different browsers, at different screen resolutions and with different plugins. Browsershots.org distributes the work of making browser screenshots among volunteer community members using a program to automatically make screenshots of web pages in their browser and upload the results to the server. So what you’re seeing is not a rendered guess at how your site will display? it’s an actual image of how the site looks on different platforms.

W3C Markup Validation Service: a free service that checks Web documents in formats like HTML and XHTML for conformance to W3C Recommendations and other standards. Type in your URL, and the W3C will check the code to insure that everything is ship-shape. This is the best tool to use to check for things like tags that haven’t been closed.

Now, before you panic at the results, let me step out on a limb and suggest that the W3C Validator is just a wee bit overzealous at times. It doesn’t like the way that TypePad encodes line breaks for instance and will suggest that you go in and hand edit all of those. Nah? they’re wrong, but they work. Another thing that it will almost certainly take you to task on is whether you’ve used alt tags on all your images. I strongly suggest that you do (you’ll get way a lot more traffic from google images if you use alt and title tags) but it won’t adversely effect the display of your blog if you don’t.

If you’re not deeply familiar with HTML, It’s a good idea after checking your code to read up on each of the items the Validator lists and make an informed decision as to whether you must, should or might want to make the changes. A blog that is in perfect W3C compliance is definitely going to look the way you want it to on any platform, but it’s also important to balance perfection against practicality.

My suggestion? If you really wanted to fix something like all of your line break tags, use the Search & Replace tool found at the top of your listed entries. IMPORTANT: be careful when doing a replace, because there is no undo. If you are making a replacement in many of your entries, you may wish to first use the Export feature to back up your entries. Also, be aware that the Search & Replace tool can change both text and HTML in your blog. If you replace a term used in any links on your blog it will break the links and you’ll have to go back and fix that by hand.

The W3C also provides a number of more specific tools for checking the compliance of your code.

The Basics – what you should run on all your web pages

The MarkUp Validator: Also known as the HTML validator, it helps check Web documents in formats like HTML and XHTML, SVG or MathML.

The Link Checker: Checks anchors (hyperlinks) in a HTML/XHTML document. Useful to find broken links, etc.

The CSS Validator: validates CSS stylesheets or documents using CSS stylesheets.

The above three can be used all-in-one by running the Log Validator. Unlike the others, this tool helps improve the quality of a whole site, step by step, by finding the most popular documents that need to be fixed in priority. Learn more about this method in the Web Standards Switch document.

Checking your RSS Feed

If you’re using the built-in feed that TypePad provides or running your feed through Feedburner, you won’t be likely to need these. But if you’ve created a comments feed or a feed for categories, you might want to run it through one or both of the following validators to make sure it’s functioning properly for all readers.

W3C Feed Validator: Check newsfeeds in formats like ATOM and RSS.

FeedValidator, works with RSS 0.90, 0.91, 0.92, 0.93, 0.94, 1.0, 1.1, and 2.0. It also validates Atom feeds. If the validator finds any problems in your feed, it will give you messages for each type of problem and highlight where the problem first occurs in your feed. If you’re unsure what a message means, click the "help" link next to the message for a fuller explanation.

Extra Credit: Checking Security, Backwards Compatibility and
compliance with Section 508 Accessibility guidelines

And finally, for those of you who want to achieve maximum usability, here are some further resources. I suggest starting by taking a look at Mark Pilgrim’s free online e-book, Dive Into Accessibility: 30 days to a more accessible web site. The book explains why you should care about making your blog more accessible, and how you can do so. From the introduction:

To answer the first question, I will present character sketches of five people: Jackie, Michael, Bill, Lillian, and Marcus. These people have several things in common:

1. They all have a combination of physical, mental, and technological disabilities which make it more difficult to use the Internet.

2. Although fictitious, they all represent real people with disabilities, and they use the Internet in ways that real people with disabilities use the Internet.

3. They all have difficulty reading your web site.

To answer the second question, I will present 25 tips that you can immediately apply to your own web site to make it more accessible. Although these concepts apply to all web sites, I will be focusing on implementation using popular weblogging tools. If you use some other publishing tool or template system, you will need to determine how to implement the tips in your tool of choice.

Each tip will focus on a single concept, explain the reasoning behind it, and show who will benefit once you implement it. This is why the character sketches come first, because they change the tone of the first question from "Why should I bother?" to "Who benefits?" Answer: "Marcus benefits." "How does Marcus benefit?" "Well, let’s look at that…" And so forth.

Don’t panic if you are not an HTML expert. Don’t panic if the only web site you have is a personal weblog, you picked your template out of a list on your first day of blogging, and you’ve never touched it since. I am not here to tell you that you need to radically redesign your web site from scratch, rip out all your nested tables, and convert to XHTML and CSS. This is about taking what you have and making it better in small but important ways. Jackie, Michael, Bill, Lillian, and Marcus will thank you for your attention.

Tools you can use to test your blog for security, accessibility and backwards compatibility:

WebXACT: a free online service that lets you test single pages of web content for quality, accessibility, and privacy issues.

Delorie Software provides a number of free services to the web community to assist web authors who wish to make their information available to the largest audience. These tools provide alternate ways of viewing your pages, so that you can ensure that your content is received properly by all viewers.

Lynx Viewer: See how this browser views your page

Search Engine Simulator: See what the search engines see 

Web Page Purifier: Restricts your HTML to published standards

Web Page Backward Compatibility Viewer: See what your page looks like without support for various features

HTTP Header Viewer: Make sure your server is sending the correct MIME headers for your files. 

HTTP Request Viewer: Find out exactly what your browser is sending to my server.

The government also provides a list of companies that provide 508 compliance software as well as further information on how federal agencies are working to eliminate barriers in information technology, to make available new opportunities for people with disabilities, and to encourage development of technologies that will help achieve these goals.

Time for Team Blogging?

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Once a blog becomes successful, or at least starts getting busy, you soon realise there is more involved in professional blogging than just writing. I was thinking this morning about all the hats a pro blogger has to wear in the daily blogging routine. Here are some “blogging hats” that I came up with …

  • Entrepreneur – the ideas, the vision, motivation and drive
  • Salesperson – brings in the advertising, sponsorships, does the deals
  • Bookkeeper – keeps the numbers in check
  • Editor – controls the output, checks and amends for quality, final decision on topics
  • Researcher – investigates stories and information for articles, gathers facts
  • Writer – does the actual writing, possibly based on the researchers gathered materials
  • Designer – keeps the blog looking great, formats posts so they look their best
  • Organiser – admin, project management, to-do lists, calendars, diaries …
  • Tech Support – backups, fixes things when they go wrong, hosting, software upgrades, modules, ad serving …
  • Mentor – impartial wisdom and advice, been there got the t-shirt
  • Network manager – for when the enterprise grows from one blog to many, someone needs to run the farm
  • …

I think it would be fair to say that it is a rarity that one person encompasses all the qualities required to an excellent degree. I can get by in most areas but my designs will never win awards, I can sell but find it daunting and bookkeeping? Well maths has never been my strongest point …

In the “Beermat Entrepreneur”, Mike Southon and Chris West proposed that any business, as well as the Entrepreneur requires four “cornerstones”. These cornerstones have backgrounds in technical, delivery, finance and sales. If you see your blog(s) as a business (and you should if you want to be “pro”) then these roles do directly relate to hats a blogger needs to wear.

This says to me that as professional blogging matures there will be more and more team blogs. Blogs will become more akin to online magazines than online diaries. Note I say “team blogs” rather than “multi-author” blogs. While these blogs might well have multiple authors, the distinction I make is there will be essential team members who do not post.

Part of the success of Performancing, and Threadwatch before it, in my view is the element of editorial control.  Writers might come and go but providing the “vision” is consistent  the blog remains on form.  Then there is the business side.  While it might not be visible right now there is very much a business side. It is very important for any business to be well run in the “back office”.

Of course there will always be solo efforts, and they will probably still do very well some of them. I can only see blogging getting more complex, more business-like, and taking more ground from the mainstream media juggernauts.

Perhaps now is the time to put your team together?

Supplement Your Blogging Income With E-Reports

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Andy talks about RFIDNews.org and their paid archive subscription model. This is an excellent idea and a carryover from niche newsletters. I remember the newsletter craze of the early 1990s. Business, entrepreneurship, health, law, and financial newsletters commanded $97-1,000/yr per subscription, but had to be spot on with their articles. Just a few dozen subscriptions could sustain a business, and because such costs qualify as “professional fees”, subscribers can often use them as a tax writeoff.

If you have extensive experience in a niche industry, you could utilize your special knowledge by producing something equivalent to a newsletter.  For example, I’m working  on a hush-hush project with someone to produce a large series of free and paid e-reports (in PDF format). We’ll be launching a blog as well, which will excerpt/showcase the topics of the reports, in order to generate SE traffic. The paid reports will provide case studies, but the free material will cover most of the concepts. So there’s value in both.

This method, if you pick a suitable topic, could sustain a writing/ blogging career, without you having to beg for donations, or hope that someone clicks on your contextual ads. Now while we are not producing monthly reports per se, if you think that you can regularly produce ultra-high quality content weekly, biweekly, or monthly, you may want to look into offering subscription e-reports (PDF format). This is slightly different than the paid archives Andy discusses, and requires an extra time commitment. But the returns can be very sweet.

You will need free blog content and free teaser reports, and both will have to show that you know what you are writing about. If you have contacts with experts in your field, you may able to get some guest articles – although they’ll cost you dearly. But since you can typically charge $97 – $147 – $197 – $247 – $297/yr, it may be worthwhile, and a strong selling point. And industry professionals are likely to subscribe if you produce quality reports.

A series of one-off reports could also be lucrative, and would not require the same kind of commitment. If you plan a loose schedule of, say, 10 reports per year, and do not assign dates to them, a 50- to 100-page report could go for $27-47-97 or more, depending on the topics and how much of a niche you’re filling. You may not make a large amount of money in the first year on each report, but for 4 weekends of work, you may be able to supplement your blogging.

So if you sell 50 copies per e-report in the first year, at $27+ each, that’s 10 x $1350/yr = $13,500 minus advertising/ promotional costs. That’s not a lot, certainly not a lot to live on. But the long-tail phenomenon suggests that the sales per report will be exponentially decreasing over time, and that you may sell more copies in total in the “tail” of the life of a report than in just the first year.

If your topics are timeless, over 3-10 years you may earn some nice returns for 10-20 hours of work per month. So in the second year, you’ll have sales of new reports and older reports. In a couple of years, you could very well commit full-time and not have to rely on contextual advertising.

10 Tips for Attracting More Comments

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Your blog can be thought of in many ways. As a pulpit, a soapbox, a magazine, a platform, a newsletter, a diary. A lot of bloggers focus on the “broadcast” aspects, getting their message out. While great content is essential, never neglect the community element of your blog. As we have shown your audience can be your best asset. Here are some tips for attracting participation.


First of all, as we have said time and time again, you must answer comments that are made on your posts. It is not only the polite thing to do, it also encourages more comments. If people see they are treated with respect and they will get answers they will comment more. It still surprises me the amount of bloggers who post then sit back and ignore the feedback they receive.

I’m hoping you will be able to add to my tips or correct me if I have something a bit off. Will be pretty ironic if my post about attracting comments goes without being commented on!

On with the tips.

  1. Ask! – Ask for people to comment, you are more likely to get comments if you ask for them. Sometimes people do not know it is ok to comment. Just because there is a comment form does not mean people automatically feel worthy to post a comment. The higher the profile of the blog or the less the person feels they “know” the blogger the less likely they are to comment. By “giving permission” they will feel more entitled to comment.
  2. Seed – Like a tip jar, people sometimes need a hint, get friends to comment to start the ball rolling and you might open the floodgates. On some blogs people like to be first, on others there is a hesitation period where they do not want to expose their opinion to early.
  3. Ego – People like to talk about themselves, provide the opportunity. They might not be experts in the topic but we are all experts in our own experience and we all know what we like. You know the famous phrase about everyone having an opinion. Sometimes it is nice just to give people the opportunity to brag.
  4. Links – Bloggers and webmasters are always on the lookout for link opportunities. They might not be your ideal kind of comment but they might encourage others that it is ok to feedback. Allow link drops in your blog comment settings and do not use nofollow so the link visibly has value.
  5. Hint – Open questions are the best to get great quality answers, ie. “What do you think?”, but  they can be intimidating. If you struggle to get comments it might be easier to give simple leading ideas for what people should say, eg. “Do you agree?”, “Are you for or against?”. “Yes, no, me too” are not great responses but at least they are a sign of life!
  6. Restraint – Resist the urge to make your posts too complete if you want to receive community input. That’s one of the great things about top ten lists, you have to stop at 10! Don’t put everything into the post, especially if you know your audience has certain expertise they are bursting to share!
  7. Usability – Sometimes people don’t comment just because they can’t! Make sure the comment form is obvious and easy to use. Also do not take the visitor to a different site in order to comment. The very worst culprits for this are the hosted services that not only take you to another site, they use a popup to do it. Why not inflict actual pain while you are at it?
  8. Open – While a blog with a true membership is more valuable, if you are having difficulty getting comments open up your comment settings to allow comments with out registration. We can get away with requiring registration because we knew we would get the comments, consider carefully if your blog can get away with it too, many can’t.
  9. Topic – If you want to attract comments then you have to pick your subjects. Some subjects people just do not have an opinion on, others you can’t stop people talking about. Current affairs are good but it needn’t be contraversial, politics and religion get people talking but can also send your blog down a path you might not want to go down. Press peoples buttons. You can endlessly recycle some topics, others are shortlived.
  10. Observe – Note the topics people often comment on, there might be a trend. Just be observant. Be on the lookout for topics people comment on and write about them.

Not every post needs to get a ton of comments but if your blog hardly ever gets a single comment then it will look unpopular and start a downward spiral. Hopefully using some of these tips you will turn it the other way and create a positive community snowball affect.

Now your turn, what do you think of these tips? Have you any other ideas? What has worked for you? Is there a topic that consistantly gets comments on your blog? Let us know!

Photoshop Tutorial Performancing Banners

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After winning the recent Performancing for Firefox Banner competition, several of my fellow contestants asked me to put together a Photoshop tutorial. I happily agreed — so here goes my first attempt at demonstrating some of the techniques I utilised to create my banner.

Being both a blogging and tutorial amateur, I’ve decided to take the same approach as documenting science experiments which I learned in high school: Aim, method, result, and conclusion.

Aim

My main goal when starting any design project is to keep it clean. I try to keep it clean by doing the following:

  • Give all elements as much breathing space as you can afford.
  • Weight (give visual preference to) the elements depending on their importance.
  • Use a grid when laying the elements out.
  • Make sure typography is readable.
  • Create and stick to a simple colour scheme.

With those things in mind I then ask myself some questions.

  1. What is the desired result of this design?
  2. Does the client have any existing branding (logos, fonts etc.) that should be adhered to, and if so, is there any scope for creative interpretation of their brand?

To me, this task was primarily a branding exercise for Performancing. They’re about to release a new plug-in for Firefox and want to spread the word. Everyone knows the Firefox brand, so it was an early decision for me not to include the Firefox logo in my design. Firefox needed mentioning of course, but could do without the emphasis that the Performancing brand required.

So one big Performancing logo, a mention of Firefox and the Performancing plug-in, then a call to action (or “click here”). Simple 😉

Method

This tutorial will be based on my 160×160 banner only, as the the other two buttons pretty much follow the same theme. Also I work on a Windows PC, so Mac users should substitute CTRL and ALT key commands with their Mac equivalents.

Setup

For banners I ususally start by setting up some guides. I do this by first creating a new document at the intended size (160 x 160), making sure snapping is on (View>Snap), and that rulers are visible (View>Rulers).

Now if you drag a guide from the left ruler it should snap to the vertical center of your canvas. Nice huh? Do the the same from the top ruler for your horizontal guide. Drag guides to all four of the document sides, double your canvas size (Image>Canvas Size) and you should end up with this:

Isn’t that lovely? All this does really is set up a solid base for your design — a good foundation if you will. Now for some pretty pictures.

Background elements

I decided on rounded corners. They’re nice. They’re friendly. The easiest way to do this is with the rounded rectangle tool in the tools palette.

I usually avoid using shape paths and just stick with good old pixels. So choose “Fill pixels” from the options tool bar, and give our shape a radius of 10.

Choose white from the colours palette, create a new layer and name it “bg”, then go ahead and draw in the background for our banner using our previously created guides.

TIP: Only draw shapes with the shape tool when your window zoom is at 100%. Drawing them when you’re zoomed in will result in fuzzy edges.

I then added a single pixel outside stroke in blue using a layer style (Layer>Layer Style>Stroke).

Since we added a 1 pixel outside stroke, our shape is now 162 x 162. I then select the rectangular marquee tool and move each side of the shape in by a pixel so we’re back to 160×160. Finally, something to look at 🙂

After that we then duplicate that layer, remove the new layer’s stroke and using the rectangular marquee tool again, move each side of our new layer in by 2 pixels.

Name the new layer “bg gradient” and toggle the “Lock transparent pixels” button in the layers palette.

TIP: “Lock transparent pixels” does just that – it stops any transparent areas of a layer from being editable. This is handy for when you want to edit exclusive areas of a layer without applying a layer mask.

Now we want to apply a linear gradient from blue to white on our new layer. So using the colour picker, choose blue for the foreground colour and white for the background colour. Then select the gradient tool, and click and drag from the top to the bottom of the layer, using our guides as, well, a guide 🙂

.

OK – looking good. Let’s get a logo in there.

Performancing logo

In the new version of Photoshop (CS2), there’s a lovely new feature called “Smart Objects”. Essentially a smart object is a non-destructive vector image. This means you have a vector image inside your Photoshop file which you can resize to your heart’s content and it won’t lose any quality. Fireworks users have been using this feature since version one 🙂

So go ahead and open the Performancing logo in a vector program like Illustrator.

Copy the “P” part of the logo, paste it into our Photoshop file and choose paste as “Smart Object” from the dialogue box.

We then want to centre the logo horizontally (if it isn’t already), scale it up a bit and move it to vertical centre of the top half of our banner. Hit the enter key to apply the transformation.

Repeat the same process for the “Performancing” text part of the logo. Copy the text from Illustrator, paste into Photoshop as a Smart Object, scale it to size, and align the top edge to the guide in the vertical centre.

Although our canvas isn’t so empty any more, it’s still looking pretty flat and uninteresting. We gotta make that logo pop! What better way to make a logo stand out than with a bevel and a drop-shadow? There isn’t one – you know it’s true 😉

Bevels and drop-shadows can quickly go pear-shaped if you’re not careful, but I’ve found that the key for both is subtlety. I basically just play around with the bevel layer style settings until things look just right. I applied the following settings to get the final logo looking the way it does:

The drop-shadow settings are pretty straight forward, however since the “P” in the Performancing logo is dark blue, I thought I’d add a white, single pixel outside stroke to it in order to make the edges of the logo more defined. I set the colour of the drop-shadow to be dark blue rather than black, as it looks more realistic in this instance.

So what we end up with after applying our layer styles is looking pretty good.

Although our logo now looks much nicer and more tactile, it’s still not really popping. We can add more pop by putting a radial gradient behind it. So go ahead and duplicate the “bg gradient” layer and call the new layer “glow”. Select white for both the foreground and background colours with the colour picker, then select the gradient tool and a radial gradient.

We then want to open the Gradient Editor by clicking the white drop-down menu on the left. Then select “Foreground to Transparent” from the Presets.

Creating a glow behind the logo is then simply a matter, of clicking and dragging with the gradient tool from the centre of the logo to the bottom of the banner. What you should end up with it this:

Much more poppy! Now it’s time for some text.

Text

As I mentioned at the beginning of this tutorial, I wanted to keep the message of the banner pretty simple. Something along the lines of “Hello! We’re Performancing. We like bloggers and we’ve got this great plug-in for Firefox”. I thought the Performancing tagline “Helping Bloggers Succeed” summed up part of the message, so all that was left was to mention the Firefox plug-in. I added the tagline and the remaining text using my current favourite font, Myriad Pro.

Tip: When setting non anti-aliased text, make sure “Fractional Widths” is selected in the Character palette sub-menu. This kerns (spaces out) the text evenly and will make a huge difference to the end result.

Page curl

I imagine this section of this (now quite lengthy) tutorial, will attract the most attention 🙂

There were no magic tricks used when creating the page curl — it’s really just a couple of shapes and a gradient or two.

Select the pen tool, pick a nice, rich orange with the colour picker, then choose “Shape layers” from the options tool bar.

Go ahead and draw in the page curl as below, then right-click the new shape layer in the layers palette and select “Rasterize Layer”.

To create the shading on the page curl I used the “Burn” tool.

Select “Highlights” from the “Range” menu in the Options tool bar, and draw a straight line along the bottom edge of the curl. To do this, click just outside the top tight of the curl, hold down the shift key, then click just outside the bottom left of the curl. Repeat this step a couple of times, and experiment a little, until the shading of your curl looks believable.

To add more realism to our page curl, we need some shadows. We’ll add two — one under the left of the curl, and one directly below it.

For the shadow on the left I chose black with the colour picker and then I drew in a shape.

Then I dropped the opacity of the shadow down to 15% using the layers palette “Opacity” menu, and repositioned it under the curl.

TIP: You can quickly change the opacity of a layer by selecting it and pressing a number on your keyboard. Pressing “5” once for example, will reduce the opacity to 50%. Pressing “5” twice changes it to 55% etc.

I then created a new layer and drew a circular selection using the circular marquee tool.

For the bottom shadow I chose black for the foreground and background colours with the colour picker, selected the radial gradient tool, and again chose “Foreground to Transparent” from the Preset menu.

Then I filled my selection with a radial gradient.

Then we need to distort our radial gradient by selecting Transform>Distort from the Edit menu.

All that remains for our shadow is to delete the extraneous bits using the Polygonal Lasso Tool and they’re done.

TIP: You can get point-to-point (straight) selections using the standard Lasso Tool by holding down the Alt key as you draw.

Nearly done! Now we need to mask out the bottom right corner of our rounded rectangle background layer using a layer mask.

Select the “bg” layer, then draw a selection using the polygonal lasso tool again, similar to the way I’ve done below:

Now to mask out the “bg” layer, invert the selection (Select>Inverse), then click the “Add layer mask” button at the bottom of the layers palette.

What you should end up with is a pretty convincing page curl, that begs the user to click it. But that’s not all! To encourage clicking even further I added a cute little arrow from a font (of which the name escapes me) to the top of our curl. Tactile and inviting — two great things a banner should be 😉

And to finish off I added a call to action. Put simply, some “click here”, “download me now” text, under the bottom shadow.

Result

It speaks for itself really 🙂

Seriously though, I’m quite pleased with the final banner, particularly since it won me $1000! Woo-hoo!

Conclusion

I hope you’ve learned some neat little tips and new approaches from this tutorial, and if anyone likes it I’ll probably throw a few more tutorials together.

Please leave a comment if you’ve learned something new, or particularly if you’ve got a better way of doing something I’ve outlined!

One last thing… For those of you who want to use the Performancing banner on your site, I’ve put together a small PHP application that will generate the ad for you on any colour background. Check out the Performancing banner Configurator™ here.