Free Website Graphics Using Wordle

Visually depicting your site’s content to visitors with free graphics for websites makes the content easier to read, and keeps people interested in what you are writing about. One of the many free blog graphics toy is the “word cloud” generator Wordle. A word cloud builds an attractive graphic based on text you copy in or highlights in a dramatic way the most popular words from your source text such as a RSS feed.

Don’t forget, you can use this graphic in documents, on T-Shirts, or anywhere you can think up!

Basically, a list of words from your site is weighted against each other, and larger fonts are used to identify the highest frequency words. Free blog graphics like a word cloud can boost your business by:

• Giving you a better idea of what your readers are interested in reading. (if built from your site’s RSS Feed)
• Enabling you to help your readers to navigate your site more easily. (if built from your site’s RSS Feed)
• Promoting your site as a fresh and innovative online business.
• Making your site more attractive and interesting.
• Letting your site stand out from competitors.
• Enhancing the Search Engine Optimisation of your page. (if built from your site’s RSS Feed)
• Pulling traffic to your site. (if built from your site’s RSS Feed)

Wordle enables you to create beautiful free blog graphics. Fonts, layouts and even colour combinations can be played with. This allows customisation of a unique word cloud the theme of your site, or for your topic needs.

With Wordle, a free keyword cloud can be made into a variety of images that can then be uploaded to your site, printed or even shared with friends in the Wordle Gallery. The site is a dream to navigate and provides a flexible tool for ramping up the “stickyness” of your site.

Want to create your own? Here’s how…

1. Point your favourite internet browser to http://www.wordle.net. The homepage is pretty straightforward; the first paragraph gives you a bit of information about Wordle.


Wordle Home Screen

2. Click Create your own~ to add the content for your free blog graphics.

You are given three options for selecting your “bunch of text”. Cut-and-paste content into the box provided at the top, or enter the URL of a site or feed, or enter the user name for a del.cio.us members tags to be visualised.



Wordle Enter Text Screen

As an example, I have used the first option to paste the content for this article on creating a free graphics word cloud.



An example of Wordle using this article

3. I then click Go, and am taken to another window where my content now jumps from the page! You better view your bright savy creation by clicking on the Open Window tab at bottom left.


The final result presented by Wordle

The Language tab at top left allows me to; make all my words upper or lower case; change languages; remove common words and to see the frequency count for each individual word. The Font tab allows a wide selection of funky and classic style choices. A Layout tab provides options to play with the shape of your cloud. And the Color tab provides preset colour combinations as well as allowing customisation of your colour palette.

The Edit tab at far top left allows you Un-do and Re-do tasks. A Randomisation tab at bottom centre lets you jumble the words according to the laws of chance.

4. Finally, when you are happy with your fabulous creation, you can push Print (tab is bottom left) or Save to the Public Gallery, the tab on the bottom right.

Don’t forget to have a look at the Wordle Gallery for more ideas on how to design your free graphics word cloud. There is also a link on the homepage to a Forum for more info or to swap ideas.

A free, easy, innovative and fun tool for free website graphics. Enjoy!

Note: you will need Java to run the software, the plug-in can be downloaded free from http://www.java.com. To get your free website graphics into a format which you can reuse later, follow instructions at http://take-a-screenshot.org/ on how to take a screenshot and save it as a graphic.

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