You dont need to buy Photoshop for 600 bucks. Or whatever it costs these days. There is a bevy of free tools out there just up for grabs.
In Windows, you can use Paint.net. Note you will have to install a few patches to Microsoft Windows on occasion to get it to work. But once this is done it should work flawlessly.
Lets say you want to make a snazzy logo for your site, or perhaps you want to make a quick graphic for a help guide or manual. Most of us are not naturally gifted artists, but the tools out there are very powerful.
And most importantly, some of the best tools are free. The one you want to watch out for first is called Inkscape. It lets you draw all sorts of amazing graphics using geometric shapes, lines, curves, etc, and do so very quickly once you get the hang of it.
You dont have to start from scratch either. You have a wide variety of stock graphics available from OpenClipArt.Org. Download their full pack. It has both SVG (scalable graphics), and PNG (Raster Graphics).
The difference between the two is this. The SVG files can be manipulated by inkscape to an incredible degree, and often taken apart into their component parts for customization for your own logos and graphics. Before using on your web page, you can export those files back to PNG form for posting on the web directly from Inkscape.
If you have any questions on inkscape's use, feel free to comment here and i'll try to help you out. The graphic below was done in inkscape, and is used on one of my sites, a jeep forum called OrlandoJeepChat
If you really want to keep track of who is visiting your forum, and what items on the forum are most popular, you dont need to spend any money.
Google provides an amazing free tool called Google Analytics. It will track visitors arriving to your site, what link they followed to get there, and if they used a search engine, what keywords they used to find your content.
All of this is incredibly useful information if you plan on increasing traffic to your site. Some ISP's also provide the tool AWStats, but it's in my opinion not as streamlined. To each their own I guess.
If you administer a forum, for whatever purpose. You probably get a lot of users asking you how to add an avatar to your site. You might even get the occasional e-mail with an attached photo saying "please help me make this into an avatar."
Lifehacker has an article on a website that makes it easy for inexperienced users to create their own avatar photos. The application is called MyPictr.
If you have a portal page that enters your forum, you can have a "Getting Started" tutorial area that includes a link to this application for users just getting into the game.
The biggest game in video hosting right now is of course YouTube. They make it incredibly easy to upload clips to their site, and even make it possible to take those clips and embed them on your own site.
For Forum Users If you are on a Mac system, you can create video clips very easily using iMovie. If you are on a PC platform, you can use iMovie to create your video clips. These are used if you are starting with source material from a DV camcorder, which is generally what most people find when they go to best buy.
However, if you are looking for a quick and easy way to post videos, you can sidestep the editing process almost completely. You see, internet videos are usually low resolution, and low file size for fast download. The DV camcorder has waay to much resolution. Most users spend much of their time recompressing these videos before posting online.
So ask yourself, why not save yourself a lot of time, and shoot your video in a format that will be suitable for immediate forum posting, and save you from the hastle of managing all those pesky DV tapes.
Grab yourself one of the very inexpensive MPEG4 camcorders with either hard drive or SD card storage. You can then pop the SD card or USB cable directly into your PC, and upload the video directly to Youtube. I made the video below on a Sony Handycam DV camcorder, and spent approx 20 minutes recompressing it and lowering the resolution for online postinng. That time could have been saved by using mpeg4 directly, which Youtube redily accepts.
For Site Administrators If you use Vbulletin then by default most users will not be able to paste HTML. This is to protect your site. Rather than enabling HTML, you can use the following extension: AME Auto Media Embedding. The AME extension automatically detects links to google and youtube videos, and embeds a video player safely.
When picking forum software for your club, I strongly recommend Vbulletin. The hardcore forum users out there expect it. Many people in the offroading community already use one of the most popular vbulletin installs out there, Pirate 4x4.
