Creating a Logo For Your Site

A site logo is a work of graphic art that usually contains your site's title and possibly an image or design. Logos generally appear at the top of a site and are usually around 468 X 60 pixels in size.

Despite the fact that these graphics contain our site's title and appear at the top of our pages, logos do not replace the need for H1 tags within our html documents. Even when we add appropriate alt tags (which we should ALWAYS do), our sites will be indexed more appropriately by the search engines if we include h1 tags as well.

Why a logo, then? Because people remember images better than they remember words. A visitor may well remember your logo and hunt your site up based on what they saw in the logo, whereas they may not otherwise remember the name of our site.

How you can get a logo graphic varies. If your site is not a business related site and you do not rely on your site for income, you may do well to use one of the many online banner generating programs. These programs are often free to use and require little or no programming knowledge to use them. The downside to these programs is that the logos rendered are often generic and will not make yourÊsite stick out in your visitors minds. However, there is a place for such programs. If you'd like to try online banner generators, you can find them for free at site's such as Cool Text, Coder.com, Media Builder, or by doing a search such as "free banner generator" on one of the SEs.

Another option, if you are yourself artistically inclined is to use a graphics rendering program to create your own logo. Any of the popular desktop publishing programs on the market will work. Some of the more appropriate programs for this purpose are Macromedia's Fireworks, Macromedia Flash (you can use this program to build rich media banners, animated banners, or static banners!), and Adobe PhotoShop, but your favorite program will probably work as well.

Finally, logos that are most memorable usually come from professional designers. Logo design is surprisingly inexpensive and often worth the cost when you factor in the branding it performs. If you are looking for a professional logo designer, I encourage you to consult our directory of graphics and logo designers.