Blinking Badges

Years ago when I set up my first website I loved animated icons.  They were all the rage and when not overused added a nice bit of interest to websites.  After awhile though seeing the same animated new on just about every website you visited the interest wore thin.  Enterprising web designers created their own unique animated graphics.  When I started blogging I really liked blinkies.  Blinkies are small little graphics with a cute saying.  They appear to blink usually with running dashes or similar along the edge.  An example of a blinkie is the Canadian blinkie at the top of my sidebar.  Blinkies for the most part seem to have fallen out of favour but some of us still use them.

Some bloggers have animated their 125 x 125 pixels blog badge.  I suspect the reason for this is they feel an animated badge will draw more attention.  While I can't say anything definitive with respect to drawing attention what I can comment on is the actual movement may end up turning readers off your blog if you have too many of these on your blog.  Imagine if you are using Entrecard, Adgitize, CMFAds and Project Wonderful widgets on your blog and four animated badges show at the same time.  Rather than being interesting these badges become a distraction for the reader.  Distracted readers tend to spend less time on your blog so the end result is the animated badge has a negative effect.

I do a lot of scrapbooking, both convention paper and digital.  I know how important it is to add movement to your layout.  The same applies to blog layouts and and promotional graphics used to promote the blog.  In this case movement on promotional graphics should not be actual movement as in animation.  Rather a more effective way to achieve movement is through the use of font placement, shadows and content.  Leave the animation to the once in awhile, cutsey content you want to add but not as your main blog promotion.

Garden Gnome
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