Recently I was working on a site for which I needed buttons. These buttons were to be used in a sidebar widget – in this case red buttons that looked like this:
You would think this would be an easy task to accomplish, and my first thought was to go to Fiverr.com and get these buttons created for $5 each. It occurred to me, however, that this task ought to be simple enough that I could do it myself. I work with a wonderful Fiverr designer in Indonesia but because of the time difference, the turnaround time is 8 to 10 hours.
I started looking around and I discovered that it was difficult to find online button makers. I did find sites like BestCSSButtonGenerator.com and ButtonMaker which create attractive buttons but they create CSS files that you have to upload. The CSS component allows you to choose different looks when a user hovers over the button and after a visitor has already visited. These are neat features but not essential to my needs. In any case, I prefer not to mess with the CSS files in my WordPress installs so I kept looking.
Another interesting concept is DaButtonFactory. Here, you create a button that is hosted on DaButtonFactory’s servers and you simply link to the URL. The problem with this approach, of course, is that if DaButtonFactory.com goes dark or if they suddenly decide to start charging for hosting all those buttons, I would have a problem.
I had also tried an online button generator at http://jirox.net/AsButtonGen. This was a site maintained by a Japanese company and it did everything I needed – but now it has gone away.
So my search continues….
