Giveaway: Win a Premium WordPress Theme from ThemeFuse!

Win a ThemeFuse WordPress Theme Having a unique and beautiful mobile responsive theme for your website can make all the difference in how long your visitors stay. They say the first impression matters and it’s true. If your site is slow or hard to navigate, your visitors probably won’t come back. And if your site is cluttered who’ll want to become a regular reader?

The folks over at ThemeFuse want to give one of you a fancy new theme for your website! More on that in a minute. First I want to tell you about my favorites.

The Muse
Less is better seems to be the theme these days. Clean, uncluttered by sidebars and banners, this theme is for the writer or journalist who wants to focus on sharing good content. There is a page template with a sidebar if you like that kind of thing, but I am loving the timeline structure!

MetroVibes
This theme is unique and oh-so-clean. Once again, no clutter. Very visually oriented. It’s made to be a portfolio theme, but I really like the blog layout and think it would be great for any writer!

Evangelist
Built for churches, but take a good look at the interior pages, especially the blog (latest news) and the gallery. I just love the colors, the built in buttons on the music and sermons pages and beautiful icons at the top of each page, near the newsletter signup at the bottom, etc. It’s the details that make this theme.

Ready to Win?

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Giveaway is open to anyone over the age of 18. I was not paid or compensated in any way to host this giveaway or talk about ThemeFuse. I do it because I want YOU to have a chance to win a fabulous theme!

Click to Tweet WordPress Plugin for Quotes and Action

Click to Tweet WordPress Plugin You’ve written a beautiful piece and you’ve got some pretty good attention grabbing quotes, but getting people to share your content has always been the hurdle. You have social sharing icons, sure, but people are lazy and they’re not going to click to share an article.

They will, however, share a really good quote or thought provoking message, especially if you make it easy.

For a while now some of my favorite bloggers have been using a tool called Click to Tweet. It’s a great concept… you create a catchy phrase or sentence, visit clicktotweet.com and put in your message and the link you want to include, then it gives you a custom url and you can link that up in your blog like so:

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Looking Through My Window

Image Credit: Flickr user calliope

Image Credit: Flickr user calliope

Every so often in life we’re given a window thru which to see a glimpse of ourselves the way other people see us. For an introvert, this can be a powerful thing. We’re not born performers and most of the out of the ordinary things we do or accomplish aren’t noticed by the masses. Most of the time I’m ok with that. I prefer to be a strong gear keeping things running under the watch face and let other people do the bright and colorful and fancy. But, there are a few areas of my life, passions I hold and tend to ignore, that surface now and then and when they do I feel whole and happy and ready to take on the world.

One of these passions is sign language.

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How to Make a Watermark in PicMonkey

How to Make a Watermark in PicMonkey You’re a photographer and you love using PicMonkey to edit your images, but you wish you could find a way to use a watermark in PicMonkey. Boy have I got a treat for you! Not only can you use your own watermark in PicMonkey, you can also make a watermark in PicMonkey!

PicMonkey Watermark Tutorial

Let’s start with creating a watermark.

Go to PicMonkey.com and click the Create a Collage tab. Any collage will do. Use the sizing box under the collage to resize the image so it’s not too big. I used 600px wide. Then, use the color palette icon on the left to open the background options and check the Transparent Background box. You should have a transparent box!

Next, click Edit in the top toolbar. This will take you from the collage editor to the image editor.

Don’t see anything? Good! That means you have a transparent square!

The next step is to put an overlay on the transparent box so you can see it while you’re working on it. Use the Butterfly icon to open the Overlays menu. Then select a square or rectangle. Once it’s on the background, resize it so it covers the whole transparent image. You can make this overlay any color you want while you’re working. You’re going to delete it later.

Now for the fun part!

Select a fun overlay… line art is usually best. An anchor, an arrow, a flower or other geometrical shape will do. Put it on the image and resize however you like by grabbing a corner and dragging out till it’s the size you need. Next, use the color box to recolor it. (I prefer to make one black watermark and one white, so I can use the black one on light photos and the white one on dark photos.) Let’s go with white for now. After the pretty overlay is white, use the Fade slider to lighten it. 80% is a good place to start.

Put on some text. Choose any style you like. Make it white. Use the Fade slide to lighten it so it matches the graphic overlay.

Now, use the Crop tool on the left to crop your image down to just the watermark. Grab the original overlay from the first step and delete it so all that is left is your pretty graphic and text.

Save to your computer.

Using a Watermark in PicMonkey

Open your pretty photo in PicMonkey.

On the left, select the butterfly icon, but instead of using one of their pre-made overlays, scroll to the very top of that menu and use the white ‘Your Own’ button. Upload your fancy new watermark. Resize and position your watermark and save your photo.

It’s that easy!

Video: PicMonkey Watermark Tutorial

What’s your favorite thing to do with PicMonkey?