Thanks to Cheryl Liquori from the fabulous Breakfast Blogging Club for inciting me to write this post.  I was going to do a presentation, but it somehow seemed more appropriate (and easier to share links) to just make it a blog post.

The effective use of images can make your blog come to life.  A wall of text is all well and good for when you’re trying to explain the meaning of life or writing a book, but many people stop and read a web page because and image triggered some kind of emotion in their mind.  So, in this post, I’ll give you 5 tools you can use to begin to use images effectively on your site.

The Legal Fine Print

Images, like other online content, are subject to copyright.  Make sure you have permission to use the images you put on your site, because your ISP won’t hesitate to pull your site offline if they receive a cease and desist letter from a copyright holder.

Finding Images

If you’re a photographer or can draw, you might be able to produce your own stuff. However, the internet is a fount of resources when it comes to finding illustrations for our sites.  Some are free and some are paid.  Here are some tools:

1) CreativeCommons.org – This site, dedicated to teaching people about legally licensing and sharing content online, provides a search engine and descriptions of licenses for finding content for re-use.  One site that CC.org searches is Flickr.com – The world’s most fabulous photography community.

This image was found when searching CC.org for images of Oakland, and added to our blog post using the HTML code provided by Flickr.

2) Istockphoto.com – A stock photography site where you can license images and video.  They’ve got a thorough search engine and lots of useful tags.  There are other stock photo sites on the web (and even ones that offer free content) but I find istockphoto the most affordable and reputable of the bunch.  You can buy an image for your site starting at about $2.50.

Bonus tool:  If you do your work from screenshots, you should pick up a screen capture application that lets you annotate images.  I like Jing, from TechSmith, because it’s available on Mac and Windows, and allows me to upload screenshots and videos to their site for a small yearly fee.

Preparing Images

Your images should be the “right size” for your blog – and no bigger.   Consider pixel size as well as byte-size.

Some tools:

3) Google Picasa - This desktop application lets you organize, tag, and edit photos and images, as well as export them at various sites.  Extremely useful and free.  You don’t have to use Picasa Web Albums to be a Google Picasa user.

Aviary.com – this online suite of tools provide almost everything that Photoshop has but can be used through a browser.

Pixels and Bytes

Your site is made of rectangles.  Some of these are particular sizes and putting an image that fits properly in one of these rectangles is recommended.  For example, the content column on this page is 500 pixels wide, so I would use an image of that size in it.  Your theme might put the kibosh on images that are the wrong size, but far more often they’ll overflow and overlap something else.

(4) You can tell WordPress to make your images the right size by going into your Media Settings (Settings, Media).

The finder can tell you all sorts of useful information

You can find out how big your images are from your operating system.  On the Mac, this information is displayed in the Finder when you use the 3-column view.  You can also get it by looking at the image “info”.  Windows has similar tools.

SEO for Images and WordPress

Most search engines only look at the text on our sites.  Images, which have metadata embedded in them, can also be tagged and labeled properly for use.  The tags and labels are applied through captions (like the one on the left), and to the HTML “img” tag that tells the browser and search engines what’s on your page.

(5) Some helpful articles about preparing images and tagging them properly, in particular to help w/ SEO:

Top 7 Image Optimization Tips from Zemalf  is full of details and is a very quick overview (somewhat technical).

From Website In a Weekend: Advanced Img Tag Handing for SEO (Part 1 and Part 2) – accessible, detailed, step-by-step explanations with circles and arrows and everything.

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