Many "Button Maker" programs can be found on the Internet.
I have tried a variety of them. Some do a good job and some
are not that great. The program BUTTONGADGET2 works pretty
good and generates some good looking buttons.
I use MS PAINT to trim the size of the rendered buttons and
PAINT SHOP PRO to adjust the contrast and lighting of the images.
There are "royalti free" buttons creators, like webbuttons, an online button creator wich allows you then to save the created button into your hard drive...
Just google a bit...none of this is new...