05 March 2010

[web] An A-Plus Tutorial On Adding Social Sharing Buttons To Your Website

2338.
I read a whole lot of tutorials all the time on design and art, whether or not I mean to use the information. And lately, I've been reading tutorials on how to do web image design and coding, just as part of my self-imposed Adult Education program. And I've seen a lot of tutorials via Twitter.

Twittering designers show that it's possible to create a website design in Photoshop, which is possible if you're doing conceptualizing work, but transferring those to Web code is another matter. Few, if any of these tutes, however, provide you with a way to translate the design into code, which is kind of a cop-out, in my perhaps-unfair opinion … sure, you can mock up a great website concept in Photoshop (or even Illustrator, and Pariah Burke's showed me how you might translate that Illustrator design right into web code), but is what you just mocked-up translatable?

Richard Darrell has just done the necessary. It need not be mentioned that sharing websites and blog posts get Tweeted, Dugg, Delicioused, etc, etc, all the time. Your content might be more likely to go there if you provide buttons to make it easier for the reader. I found the button at the bottom of each of these posts by going to AddToAny.com and embedding code in my Blogger template (the service of which is less satisfying these days … but that's for another program).

Richard's tutorial, hosted at his site Raster Rebels, shows you not only how to create some pretty spiffy looking buttons (don't click 'em, they're like nipples on a dude right now):



With all the fashionable gloss and clever take on the symbols (I like the way they're all tilted 45 degress right), but … and here's the best part … he also provides you with the code that will enable yout o make the buttons truly yours. That's something few tutorialists bother to do, and that's why I commend this to anyone curious as to how to make it for themselves.

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