Now that you’re well established on Twitter and you’re tweeting away with your 140-character-or-less observations, ideas, and updates, it’s time to fly your Twitter flag. If you have a blog, personal home page, or other Web site where you live your online life outside of Twitter, you should dress up that site with text or image links that take people to your Twitter home page. If people like what they see and use Twitter, they need only click your Follow button to get onboard; if they’re not on Twitter yet, you might just inspire them to get an account so they can keep up with your tweets. Either way, you end up with more followers and life just keeps getting better.
Adding a Twitter link to your Web site
The simplest way to point someone to your tweets is to add a link to your Twitter home page. Ideally, you should place this link near the top of your page where people are sure to see it. Most sites have content that automatically appears on every page (such as a site header or a sidebar), and that’s the ideal location because it means you only have to add the link once to that section and it appears automatically on all your other pages.
Creating a text link
If your Web host provides you with an online editor, use it to insert your links. How this works varies from host to host, but the following general steps are nearly the same with all hosts: Place the cursor where you want the link to appear and add some text (for example, “Follow Me on Twitter” or “See What I’m Doing on Twitter”). Select the text, click the editor’s link tool, and then specify the address http://twitter.com/yourname, where yourname is your Twitter username.If your site requires you to edit HTML to add a link, open the page or file in your HTML editor, place the cursor where you want the link to appear, and then type the link using the following HTML code (replace yourname with your Twitter username, and modify the link text to suit your style).
<a href=”http://twitter.com/ yourname ”>Follow me on Twitter!</a>
Creating a Twitter badge link
A humble text link is better than nothing, I suppose, but if it’s Twitter bling you want on your site, then plain text just doesn’t cut it. Instead, you need to get yourself a Twitter badge (also called a button ), a small graphic that includes something Twitterish (such as a bird or some variation on the Twitter logo), which you then set up as a link to your Twitter home page.
Your first task is to locate a Twitter badge that you like. Here are some sites to check out:Limeshot Design: http://limeshot.com/2008/follow-me-on-twitter-badges Randa Clay Design: http://randaclay.com/freebies/free-twitter-graphics/Shia Design: http://siahdesign.com/archives/150Vincent Abry: www.vincentabry.com/31-logos-et-boutons-pour-twitter-2480
Note that it’s considered bad form to link directly to a badge on another site. Instead, you should download the badge you want to use to your computer, and then upload the file to your own Web site. Here are the instructions for using Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari to download an image to your computer:
Internet Explorer: Right-click the image, click Save Picture As, choose a location, edit the file name, and then click Save.
Firefox: Right-click the image, click Save Image As, choose a location, edit the file name, and then click Save.
Safari: Right-click (or Ctrl+click) the image, click Save Image As, choose a folder on your Mac, change the file name, and then click Save.
Once the image file is safely stowed on your machine, upload it to your Web site using either an FTP program or the upload tool provided by your Web host.If your Web host provides you with an onlineeditor, use it to insert your badge. How you do this varies depending on the host, but the basic steps are pretty much universal: Open the page in the editor, place the cursor where you want the image to appear, click the editor’s image tool, and then choose the Twitter badge file. Click the image to select it, click the editor’s link tool, and then specify the address http://twitter.com/yourname, where yourname is your Twitter username.
If you add stuff to your site by editing HTML, open the page or file in your HTML editor, place the cursor where you want the badge to appear, and then insert the image and link using the following HTML code:-
<a href=”http://twitter.com/ yourname ”>
<img src=”filename ” />
</a>
Here, you need to replace yourname with your Twitter username and filename with the name of the badge file (for example, twitter.png).
If you uploaded the badge to a folder, then you need to alter the code slightly. For example, if the badge resides in a folder named graphics, change the code to this:
<a href=”http://twitter.com/ yourname ”>
<img src=”/graphics/filename ” />
</a>
Reference : wiley.com
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