This post is for all your bloggers out there who deal with pictures or photographs in your businesses. You will, of course, be fully aware how brilliant blogs are at displaying your wonderful images, and I expect your blogs are bursting at the seams showing off your sumptuous fare.
There are many plugins available to create a gallery in your blog, professionally providing a slide show or a fancy fanfare of imagery. But I find these moving applications a bit annoying, and anyway, once a picture has gone by you won’t see it again until it comes around the next time.
So I wanted to work out another way of showcasing to potential clients without any complicated technical stuff, and it works simply on WordPress’s existing ‘Library’ in your ‘Media’ section, located through the left sidebar while you are in ‘admin’ mode.
This is where WordPress stores all the pictures you’ve used in your posts and pages, ready to be used again whenever you need them. Each image is given its own URL, which you can use in many ways to display throughout your blog, for example, in a text or image widget in the sidebar.
So, why not take advantage of this to display your images? You could upload a large version of your perfect picture (suitably watermarked to preserve your copyright) into the gallery. Once published, when somebody clicks on the picture they will be able to view it in its own personal page (click on any image to see what I mean).
If you can’t display this picture in its original size, you could resize it before you paste it in your gallery page. When you upload your picture, the Attachment Display Settings menu will provide the option to paste it as the thumbnail size if this is applicable.
Otherwise you will need to resize it when it is in situ. The picture’s editing menu is reached by clicking on the image in ‘edit mode’ to show the editing icons in the top left corner. Click on the mountain icon to access the edit menus, and then select ‘Advanced Settings’ in the tabs above.
You can resize your picture by by selecting the desired percentage in the sidebar, as shown above, or by changing the number of pixels.
Remember you only need to change one dimension, as WordPress will calculate the other for you.
Now you can display your pictures as icons that can be clicked on to show the picture in its true dimensions and detail in its own page. As these pages are created automatically, there is no extra work for you, but there is the inconvenience that you cannot edit these pages to include navigation or a call to action to further your business, and the visitor will have to click on the ‘back’ button to return to your website.
Results of my blogging experiment so far
The most amount of views in one day has been 12 so far, and since the third day I have always had traffic (I’m up to 70 views so far). I’m not sure about the reliability of WordPress’s statistics, as when I have received email notifications about ‘likes’ from readers, these have not been picked up. Therefore I suggest you treat these results with a pinch of salt, and don’t take them as ‘gospel’.
One of the main indicators of a successful blog is the amount of interaction you receive, whether it’s in the form of comments or ‘likes’. Even though the latter is gratifying, the former is the most desired (so far I’ve got two), as it shows you have moved the reader enough to express themselves in words rather than just pressing a button.
I have set up the sharing buttons to allow readers to share my posts, but I haven’t seen any evidence of this yet. But it is early days… However, the RSS system is set up to syndicate or feed my posts onto Twitter and Facebook, and the stats do show if anybody does click through from these to view my posts.
Frequency is certainly a good indicator to get regular traffic, but so is good content. Visitors need to know that whenever they visit they will get something worthwhile to read, as well as something new each time. Pictures make blog posts more interesting, and can say a lot more than words, so you can create a satisfactory post quite quickly and easily. I will be investigating how to make this process more efficient using various technological advances that are becoming available – watch this space.
Another thing to mention is that I take as much care with my categories and tags as with the quality of content and pictures. Adequate keyword usage stimulates the search engines and helps new visitors to find you. And it’s important to include the alt tags behind your images too, not only for the spiders to read, but to help any partially sighted visitors to understand your blog better.
If you want to take a look at the blog in question, feel free: http://aspiringcountrywoman.wordpress.com