There’s something about a blog that has their photos figured out-something wonderful. When I visit a blog the first thing that draws me in are their photos. If they have large clear photos lined up beautifully in the post I’m much more likely to click their little follow/subscribe button. Even before I read through a lot of posts-it’s just a fact that we live in a very visual society, and I am a visual person. This is why I feel like the sizing & positioning of photos is a very important thing to think about.
I’m not saying I wont read a blog that doesn’t have good photos, there are plenty that I follow, I’m just less likely to check in as often, and I’m less likely to follow new blogs that have bad photos or poorly composed posts.
However, WordPress has made things a lot easier when it comes to adding pictures, videos, social media posts, and along with that, it can also help with aligning images with text and provides features like text wrap. But a lesser-known technique might be that WordPress also lets you create a duplicate page, which works as a template for the new post. So, if you want to keep your blog’s format similar in every post, you can create a copy of an old page and change images and text to suit you. To learn step-by-step implementation, you might have to explore the WordPress guide or this post.
Understanding Your Post Space
First thing is first, you must understand the space you’re working with. It’s kind of like how you can’t really buy blinds for your window without first knowing how big your window is-what if your blinds are too small or too big? Man that would look funny.
Most blog editors are going to allow you to customize the size of your posts a little by altering the width in your template design. With blogger (unless you’ve purchased your template somewhere else and it’s preconfigured) you can easily alter it by going to Settings > Template > Customize. Once you’re in the Blogger Template Designer you can click on Adjust widths from the left hand menu and adjust your sliders there. The post size is going to be a combination of how large you set the Entire Blog vs. how large you set the sidebar sliders.
If you feel comfortable enough, this can also be adjusted in the actual HTML-which may be the only way if you’re using a pre-configured template. For help doing so, I recommend checking out this post. Warning: Not all templates will be the same-it may be best not to alter this if you aren’t 100% sure what you are doing-and ALWAYS back up your template before altering the HTML. I have a tutorial for that HERE.
If you’re happy with your blog widths, you can play with the size of your photos in your blog posts to see about what sizes happen to work for you, it will probably differ for other people, but the best tip I have for you is fill the space width-wise as best as you can. For example, I currently use a 750px width as my widest photo in order to best utilize the space in my blog posts. I try to make all photos total up to that size so they line up nicely. I’ll show you how to change that in a moment.
Choosing Photos For Your Post
Adding Photos to Your Post
For blogger simply click on the little picture icon in the editor bar along the top of your post:
For WordPress, click on the Add Media button that typically shows between your title and post:
You can also use your HTML to add the photos. Instead of using the tool that is given to you in your editor, you can use some very simple HTML codes. The first thing you’ll want to do is go into your HTML section (instead of the Compose section) and in the spot you want to put your photos in you can use some of these very basic codes:
If you want to insert an image that is not clickable, either to go anywhere or to show larger, use this code: