Wordpress – Page 8

What not to do to your Blog design

by Tricia

One of the forum that I visit regularly had a thread about what you should not do when designing your website or blog.

Here’s my list of blog design – “what not to wear”

Autoplay video

Autoplay music

flashy buttons

too many buttons (put them in a roll up menu if you must have them)

advertisements that take up the whole header area making me scroll to see the actual header and posts below.

Too many advertisements – don’t do the max Google Adsense – you actually make less money from them if you do too many!!! Plus it turns off your visitors.

Pages with so many plug ins, large file size images, buttons etc that make the page really slow to load- or worse cause it to freeze when loading.

Text that is hard to read – white on black doesn’t work if you are trying to read a long post – light gray text works better … same for florescent coloured text on black or white backgrounds, or neon backgrounds with black or white text.

no paragraphs – this makes posts very hard to read. If you want visitors to come back or stay on your site for a while use paragraphs.

Set your posts so that only 5 or 10 display on the main page!!!! We don’t need to see everything you’ve ever written on your blog for the last two years!

Tips!

Use roll up menus in your sidebars if you have lots of buttons or blogrolls etc. It really makes the page look so much tidier.

Test your blog design in Firefox, Internet explorer, Opera and Netscape – all easy to download and have on your computer. Make sure your site loads correctly and works well in all the browsers listed above,

Also look at your site on different computers. Text and background colour might look great on your monitor, but really bad on 5 other computer monitors that you test it on.

As I said in the last point- visitors only need to see your last 5 or 10 posts when they load your page. If you have more than that showing your page will load very slowly.

Same with categories and archives. Do your visitors need to see your archives dating back to 2001? That’s a long list taking up valuable blog sidebar real estate. Use a roll up menu or modify the code in your page so that only 5 or 10 archives and or categories are viewed.

Every once in a while ask your readers their opinion on your page. Ask for constructive criticism. If the majority of your readers state they don’t like something or that your page loads slowly – do something about it.

I’m sure I could add many more points to this post, but I think this is enough to get you started.

How to place image code in a WordPress post

by Tricia

I’ve found that while a number of people have mastered the art of using their WordPress blog to write text based posts they often have trouble adding images. Since there are a lot of bloggers out there who are not true webmasters in the sense that they know how to write basic code I thought I’d occasionally write some easy to follow instructions.

How to place an image to a WordPress post:

In an earlier post I told you how to upload an image into a post. Here I will discuss how to center an image, or wrap text to the left or right of an image.

Note: This technique might work well with other blogging platforms too. I’m only writing it as wordpress instructions since that is the blogging platform that I’ve used the most.

To center a picture just either center it while you are in “rich text editor” mode, or put this extra code around the image code itself:

image code

To have a photo to the left or right of a paragraph you must have the paragraph tags around the particular paragraph that you’re sticking the image in :

ie text of paragraph

with your image code beside the first paragraph tag

< image code > text

BUT … inside the image code simple put align=”left” or “right” near the img tag like this

< img align="left" rest of image code ....

Please eliminate all of the spaces between the tag codes when you place this code on your site. For instance shouldn’t have spaces between the < and > tags.

BTW hope this helps!

Put an Image in a WordPress post

by Tricia

I’ve been hanging out on some blogging related forums and one of the questions that often comes up is how to add an image into a post. There are actually several ways to do this, and once you’ve done it a few times you’ll find that it’s very easy.

I’m writing these instructions out for the WordPress blogging platform, but some of the techniques that I’ll discuss will likely apply quite easily to other blogging platforms.

How to add images to your blog post:

Method one – using image links:

If you have images uploaded onto a free photo hosting site such as Flickr or Photobucket you can easily add the image link to your post. Simply copy the image link from the photo hosting site and use the image button in the top of your post writing area to paste the link into the box that pops up after you’ve clicked the image button.

Just be sure that your cursor is in the area that you’d like the image to be placed when you click on the image button. Otherwise you’ll have to cut and paste the image code into the correct area.

Method two – uploading and image:

If you’ve taken photos with a digital camera or saved photos to your computer it’s pretty easy to upload them into your WordPress post. All you need to do is use the upload section that is directly below your post writing area in WordPress.

One thing to keep in mind before uploading photo files to your server and then into your post is the size of the file. If you are posting in Rich text format you can easily adjust the height and width of any image, but you can’t adjust the kilobytes. You should make sure that the file is preferably less than 20 kb in size before you upload it into a post otherwise it will dramatically slow the loading time of your post.

If you have photo editing software use it to edit the post for the web by making it a compressed jpeg or gif image – try to maintain the quality of the photo while you reduce the size in regard to kilobytes.

Now, when you are in writing mode in WordPress take a look just below the post content box. You’ll see an area called “Upload”. If the upload area isn’t open click on the + sign to open it.

You’ll see an area that says “File” within the Upload box. Select browse and find the image that you’d like to add to your post. You may chose to also file in the title and description information for the image file at this time as well.

Once you’ve selected the image file on your computer, click on the word upload in the bottom right of the Upload area.

After a moment the file will be uploaded and you’ll see a small thumbnail of the photo.

In WordPress 2.0 you must click on the picture to choose between adding the thumbnail of the image or the full size image to your post. Once you’ve selected which image size you’d like to use, place your cursor in the area of the post that you’d like the image to be placed, and then go back to the image and click on the words “Send Image to Editor”.

In WordPress 2.1 you’ll see several selections beside the thumbnail of the image. You can use the full size or thumbnail of the image, and you can also choose to link to the image file or not.

Since I often edit my images ahead of time to make sure they are of an appropriate size for the post I usually choose full size and none before selecting “Send to Editor”. If you’d like to use a thumbnail of your image in the post you might choose to link to the image so that your visitors can click on the link and see a larger image on a separate page.

Once you are done selecting the image size and any thing else that you’d like to choose for your image click on “Send to Editor”. Just be sure that your cursor placed in the area of the post that you’d like the image to be placed. Otherwise you’ll have to cut and paste to get the image in the right area.

Then TA DA you have a photo inserted into your post.

So how is that? Clear as mud or do you have a better understanding of how to place an image in your post now?

Don’t forget to read my article on how to center or align your image to the right or left of post text.

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