How I created the header for my blog

I once read that bloggers love to write about blogging.  Yikes.  I don’t want to do that . . . but I want to save people the headaches I went through teaching myself this stuff! 

The idea for the heading

I imitated the header from Mark Waltz’s blog.  Mark was involved in retail before entering pastoring and wrote the book entitled First Impressions: Creating Wow Experiences at Your Church .  This spring I went with some of my students to Mark’s First Impressions workshop at Granger Community Church).  I deduce from all of this that he should also be good at creating a good first impression with your website!

I got the picture of the coffee cup from stock.xchng which has quality photos for free. 

How I created the header in XnView:

I basically forged three photos (one of the coffee cup, one a black rectangle, and one of me) into one photo using the free photo editor XnView.  (I don’t have PhotoShop but I would like to though if you want to send me the money).  Here is the XnView link to download it from download.com which is the very best, most reputable place to download free software. 

In XnView, I used their tools "Tools . . . Create Panorama" to forge the three photos together.  Then I did Image . . .Convert to Colours . . . 32 Colours (Adaptive) to help blur the colours together so that the black looks seamless.  It also gives a brushed look. 

Then I did "Image . . . Resize" to 8 inches long (or 576 pixels long).

Then I did "Image . . . Add Text" and added a word or phrase at a time.