Using a Coat of Arms on Your Web Site/Blog

Once you've got your coat of arms designed you may want to use it on your genealogy/surname web site or blog. It will certainly give it a touch of class as well as brand it with your own customed designed mark. The thing that you need to keep in mind whenever you're designing graphics for the web is, small file sizes are good, large files sizes will cause slow page load times.

In a previous article where I discussed creating your coat of arms, I was careful to point out that print resolution is 300 dpi. But when it comes to using images on the web you need to optimize or downsize that resolution to 72 dpi. Print resolution is too big high to use on the web so when you get ready to upload your coat of arms image to your web site or blog, be sure to optimize it first.

Once your image is optimized, you can use it as a design element on your web page. You can resize it to a smaller size and use it in your banner or side bar or you can reduce the opacity of it (make it a lighter, paler image) and use it as a background image on your page. Unless you get carried away, you almost can't go wrong using your coat of arms on a web page or blog. It will give a classic and elegant look to your page.

If you've a taste for something a little more dramatic, you can always animate your coat of arms as shown above (if it's not animating refresh your browser page). This is a Flash animation I created a while back. When timed well and used in conjunction with other coats of arms it can fill a page and make a one-of-a-kind genealogy home page. View mine here.

That concludes this series on designing a coat of arms. I hope the ideas presented in these articles are inspiring and helpful to you. If you do create a coat of arms of your own (and I hope you will!) please upload a copy and leave a link to it in the comments below. I'd love to see what you come up with! Now go get creative with your genealogy!!!

The complete series of articles on designing and displaying a coat of arms:
Why You Need to Design a Coat of Arms for Your Family
Dissecting A Coat of Arms Achievement
Create a Coat of Arms: Design Ideas
Create a Coat of Arms: Design Considerations
Using Clipart To Create A Coat of Arms
Wearing Your Coat of Arms
Displaying Your Coat of Arms
Printing Your Coat of Arms
Digital Scrapbooking With Your Coat of Arms
Using a Coat of Arms on Your Web Site/Blog