I read your article yesterday about Creating a vanity URL on Kickstarter and it got me thinking whether there’s a way for me to create a small “Follow Me on Kickstarter” button?
That’s a great idea, actually, and one that I don’t think even Kickstarter’s come up with. To get this to work, however, we’re going to delve into some HTML and some CSS, rather than just have me create a graphical button and have everyone link to it.
As a first step, you’ll want to set up your own vanity URL on Kickstarter. Once you’re done you’ll have something like this:
Armed with that, let’s start by going to see how Kickstarter’s set up the “follow your friends” page. To get there, click on the “Find friends” link off the Kickstarter menu on the top right of any page.
You’ll end up looking at a page like this:
We need one more ingredient before we can start making our stew, the Kickstarter logo, just as a reference:
Now what I have in mind is a green button similar to the “Follow” button on the Kickstarter page, but one that actually says “Follow me on Kickstarter”. It’ll link to your vanity URL.
It’s not too hard to assemble. Here’s the sample button:
Follow Me On Kickstarter
And here’s the code powering it:
style=”padding:15px;border-radius:6px;background:#64C807;color:#ffffff;
font-weight:bold;text-decoration:none;font-family:sans-serif;”>Follow Me On Kickstarter</a>
Kinda complicated, but as you can see, the result looks very consistent with the buttons shown on the Kickstarter site itself. Simply replaced “d1taylor” with your own vanity / custom URL profile name and you can drop that button wherever you want. Oh, and if you want it to be a bit smaller, you can change the padding from 15px to 8px, and you could also add “font-size:80%” to shrink the letters themselves down too.
I’ll do both of those and this looks quite slick too:
Follow Me On Kickstarter
So there you go! Now, follow me on Kickstarter, I’ll return the favor. 🙂