Today is the final day for our New Year’s Photoblog Giveaway Contest..actually it ends in a little over 8 hours..so there is still time for join. Looking forward, I potentially have (2) contests for February…check back in for more information.

Also, you may have noticed our header has changed again…I quickly tire of seeing my headers…most last about 30 days…I enjoy designing headers for WordPress using Photoshop…and making creative use of my photography..add in some html skills and BAM!!..a new WordPress header is born. For mylatest header design, I used an image from my trip last month to New York City.

After opening up the image in Photoshop, I discarded the color information…Image>Mode>Grayscale….and  cropped the image to fit my 900×400 canvas..Finally, to add a little artistic flare to the photo, I used the Cross Hatch Filter….Filter>Brush Strokes>Cross Hatch.

For the text links on the right side, I selected the Bernard MT Condensed font…24 point font size…I varied the colors for text links randonly..with the exception of the Twitter image..I wanted to create a white padding around each text link..To accomplish this, I double-clicked on the each layer in the Layer Window…which pulled up the Layer Style>Double clicked Outer Glow..under Structure box>set Opacity to 75%…under the Elements box>set Spread to 31% ( which gave the desired thickness of white around each text link)>Ok.

I highly recommend changing the layout of your header and contents of your header group on a regular basis if you are not completely happy with your site analytics. Along those same lines, I  just picked up an interesting book on creating your own WordPress theme…I’ve always wanted to do this..as time permits, I’ll plug away at it…and will keep you posted.