Viva the Easter Broccoli Bunny! Gaining the Edge and Managing your blog audience’s expectations

Mar 20, 2008

Viva the Easter Broccoli Bunny! Gaining the Edge and Managing your blog audience’s expectations - Day 4 of 5

NOTE! If you enjoy this post, please feel free to share and twitter it with the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/2op7rq . Thanks, I appreciate it!

Are you sitting down? You should be to ensure you don’t fall off your chair after visualizing the following:

You promise me now you’re sitting, right? I don’t have to worry about hearing large <THUMPS>?

Alright then….tell me. Picture the following.

SpongeBob SquarePants battling the Cloverfield Monster.

Okay now! Is that image firmly lodged within your cranium?

Is it crowding out visions of freshly-perked coffee and the spine-tingling joy of a neat laundry room (complete with nary a single sock in sight)?

Excellent. Now tell me….what on earth could such an image convey? You’ve all heard, a picture is worth a thousand words….what would cute yellow SpongeBob up against mean scary Cloverfields make people think?

Hang on, wait a sec, what’s that you just thought?

"My gosh Barbara, I can’t for the life of me imagine this!"

Not to fear! It’s one of the photos I created for my post, What Beginners Karate Taught Me About Blogging. Here is it below!

Spongebob and Cloverfield

I was discussing the two starkly different personalities of two particular karate senseis, and wrote about how one could motivate SpongeBob to take on Cloverfield. Pretty nifty, eh?

And that brings me to today’s tutorial! One of the best ways to manage your blog audience’s expectations is to provide consistency…not only with your writings, but with your design and layout as well. When your readers choose to visit your blog, mentally they’ll think - this experience is going to ROCK!

It’s been said, a photo is worth a thousand words….but if you can really hit an emotional button with your viewer, chances are, they’ll start to tell their friends about your cool site as well. This is better than ~~seeing your child bring straight As!~~ (okay, it’s not. Even for me, that comparison flies less adroitly than a lead balloon. Let’s try again) finding your iPhone in your pants’ pocket BEFORE you turn the washing machine full Spin Cycle "on".

Here’s how I tackle adding photos/pictures to blogs..and how you can too!

Step 1). Decide on your photo/image/picture style

The majority of blogs include photos/pictures just as they are. You’ll notice on AskOwlbert.com, however, that I add a drop shadow to every picture I incorporate. I use Photoshop to do this; it’sa simple process. I’ve been told that giving my images this uniform enhancement makes my site look more professional; personally, I just think it looks plain cool.

This is my particular style. What’s yours? You can add borders around your images, colors, etc…..and the best thing is, you don’t even have to use an image editor to achieve this effect! CSS can take care of this quite spiffily for you; learn more at

Developing a consistent look and feel can go a long way towards solidifying the concept of quality on your blog. Oh, and don’t want to spend the money for Photoshop? Try GIMP - the open source version. It’s totally free and quite comparable.

Once you’ve settled on your style, you need images with which to work. It’s time for:

Step 2). Look for free resources that enhance your style.

There is a huge amount of free image resources out there for you to enjoy! For example, there are Flickr photos that are released within the Creative Commons and you can include in your blog. One such goodie is Photo Dropper - I learned about that from Skellie’s post of A Complete Guide to Finding and Using Incredible Flickr Images. It allows you to pick and choose from some awesome pictures you’ll find at Flickr.

In addition, Lorelle wrote WordPress Plugins for Images, Photographs, and Graphics; very comprehensive it is indeed! It’s definitely worth reading.

What else can you do?

You can take advantage of all the superb free icon resources online! Here are some of my favorites:

Those take care of finding images….but what about manipulating them online? You can revel in tools like:

Cool Text (makes logos, buttons, etc.)
MyImager.com (add borders, apply filters, etc.)
FlamingText (awesomely cool)
3d Text Maker
Online PhotoTool
Free Slideshow Creator
How to Add Effects to Photos in Your Blog Posts with Microsoft Word 2007

Once you have your image ready to upload, there’s one more thing you need to do:

Step 3). Smooshilate!

Quite often, manipulated photos/pictures are huge in size. But you can reduce their file size without losing any visual quality! I personally use MyImager.com . After finishing my picture on my local computer, I’ll upload it and reduce quality - the final product looks the same but is often less than half the original size.

Finally, you:

Step 4.) Upload and incorporate the photo in your blog

I generally will upload my images to the subdirectory "images" (I’m nothing if not creative). Putting your images in one location makes it quite easy for future management ofy your files.

Fun fun fun in uploading photos! Need help with uploading or adding? Here are some nifty tutorials on that:

Once you’ve uploaded your photos, you can include them in your blog posting…and voila, you’re done!

Ain’t life grand?

ThankyouVeryMuch!

Owlbert

#BEGIN highlights of this blog writing post:

Beginners blogging tips: Install the plugin Photo Dropper to add Flickr photos to your blog.

Intermediate and/or Advanced blogging tips: Develop a set theme with your photos to make your blog stand out even more.

#END highlights of this blog writing post

ps - speaking of using Photoshop to enhance pictures, check out this super Dove vid about how models are made even more "perfect." And this is what our daughters see in the media all the time.

pps - More Photoshop goodies:

Adobe Photoshop CS3 - 59 Video Training DVD Tutorial +B

Photoshop Patterns, Styles, Shapes, Addons, Plugins!!!!

Digital Photo editor works with Photoshop for MAC OSX

2000 Photo Frames Photoshop Template LOVE WEDDING Frame

Photoshop CS3 All-in-One Desk Reference For Dummies NEW

(By the way, if you have any questions about the topics in this posting "Viva the Easter Broccoli Bunny! Gaining the Edge and Managing your blog audience’s expectations - Day 4 of 5", do comment below - I'll try to clarify any issues).

Barbara Ling and Owlbert

If you find this blog posting useful, please feel free to share it below. And do feel free to let your friends know about it as well....I very much appreciate your time!