Link Buttons

This tutorial is going to cover the importance, use and basic making of Link or Affiliate buttons. Please note that this is not a graphic guide. If you want to make a button, use our button maker.

Why do I need one?
As a webmaster, one of your responsibilities is to create all the basic site stuff. A link button is among these. But why? A link button helps your visitors promote your site -- and every site wants to be promoted. The easier it is for your visitors to link to you, the more likely they are going to do so. Also, most sites like to affiliate with different site. Inorder to do this, you usually will need a link button. If you want to advertise using a Plugboard or a Button Wall, you'll also need a link button. As you can see, link buttons play a major part in your advertising.

What size should mine be?
You should have at least one 88x15 and one 88x31 pixel button. Why? Because these are the standard button sizes. Why should you care? A lot of website you may consider affiliating with (and some plugboards/button walls too!) require one of these sizes. There are other standard sizes, but these are the ones most commonly used on Neopets fansites. You can make different sizes as well, but I would recommend investing your time into making buttons of those two sizes. Also, hardly anyone is going to stick a 600 by 600 pixel sign with your site URL on it into their lookup -- its just way too huge and would ruin the entire look of their lookup. It is recommended that all your link buttons are 100 by 100 px and under.

Should it look a certain way?
Remember, a link button is often the first graphic a person sees from your site. This means, they are going to judge wether or not your site is worth visiting based on that link button image. So its important that your button is a good quality. You want to attract people to click on it --- so make it look different. 99% of all link buttons are animated -- and there's a reason for that. It looks nicer, usually. However, the animation should be subtile, not painful to the eye. Some people try to make their link buttons look extremely flashy (for example they constantly switch color from bright red, to neon green to yellow) so that you click onto them inorder to not have to see them anymore. I never go to these pages, and make mental not to visit them since thats just plain annoying.

Coding a button
When coding a button, always use the following universal code (no need to link back for this one; though it'd be nice xD):

Let me explain the code a bit. Its really a basic image link. The reason you have the target="_blank" part in the code is so that your site opens as a new window and not into a frame. IE and some other browsers automatically add an ugly blue border to image links. The border="0" part of the code prevents this. The only other thing you need to keep in mind is that if you want your button to be used on neopets, you should make a seperate code for this. Why? Because you'll need to link to a petpage with your site URL on it since neopets doesn't allow you to link to your site the normal way.

Tricks, Tips and Afterword
A little trick to improve your hits -- every month or so, change your link button and keep the code the same though. That way, on all your affiliates that display your code will show the new button. Not only is the newer button usually the better one (as your always improving your graphic skills!) but also it looks new and people will click on it since its different to them and they haven't seen it before. Cool trick huh?
Invest some time into a proper button. They make your first impression and should be quality. Keep the image size rather small; else it will take forever to load.
I hope this tutorial has helped you, it was fun to write. Feel free to link back if this was of use to you and send feedback/comments to me.
~ Kathrin