A picture is worth...

All blog posts these days need an image.

This is so our posts can be tweeted, pinned or show up bright and shiny and ALLURING to the reader when reposted to Facebook or LinkedIn.

Images are what attracts others to click through to our post and read it. Straight text has nowhere near the same amount of eye-whammy.

So that's what goes on outside our blog. But when it comes to the internal size and position of our in-post images on our blog, we also have to decide where we want our image to sit, and set a consistent style as part of our brand.

Blogger allows me to set image display pixel sizes, position, wrapping and captioning when I import the images I have created (more on that here), and I would imagine that WordPress allows the same.

There are no hard and fast rules, we just find our own style, while being careful of the impact of an image on our writing flow, and that the image matches the writing around it,  amplifying what out text is saying. We have to also be careful that an image does not chop our writing in half.

My images are always at the top left of each post, using about 45% of the page width. I create landscape images as they show best on my blog summary page.

Career blogger Liz Ryan has small images embedded all the way through in her posts on Forbes and LinkedIn, but doesn’t on her own blog, where they lead off each story like a banner right across the page.

Use a picture. It's worth, to mangle Flanders (1911), using to get a thousand reposts.


Sam

References:

• Flanders, Tess (28 March 1911). "Use a picture. It's worth a thousand words", in "Speakers Give Sound Advice", Syracuse Post Standard (p. 18). Retrieved 20 January 2016 from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_picture_is_worth_a_thousand_words
• Ryan, Liz (10 August 2015). Smart Answers to Stupid Job Interview Questions the. Retrieved 20 January 2016 from https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/smart-answers-stupid-job-interview-questions-liz-ryan
• Ryan, Liz (n.d.). Human Workplace Blog: Reinventing Work for People. Retrieved 20 January 2016 from http://www.humanworkplace.com/blog-2/reinventing-work-for-people/