Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
9
When creating images for use in your blog, consider three different types of images (as described in
Chapter 2, “Starting Your Blog Right”): thumbnails, medium-sized images, and large images. A
thumbnail should be small enough to be used for a head shot, a close-in image of a face that is typi-
cally about 70 x 100 pixels in size. (Image width is generally given before height in discussing com-
puter graphics.)
Putting a face into such a tiny image is a harsh way to treat anyone, but a thumbnail image is still
large enough to be recognizable and to liven up a post. A JPEG of this size is less than 10KB in size,
and, if you really want to, you can squeeze one into the somewhat misnamed Text widget,
described in Chapter 6, “Using HTML in Your Widgets and Blog.”
A medium-sized image is the next size up. To most blog authors, a sensible size for a medium-sized
image is about half the width of the main window in many themes, or about 200 pixels. (This is also
the full width of the sidebar in many themes as well.) With a medium-sized image defined as 200
pixels, you can still have room to flow text next to an image and have a decent-looking result for
both the text and the image. So a 200 x 200 size for medium-sized images makes sense. A 200 x 200
pixel JPEG image might be about 40KB in file size.
A large image should be about the width of the main blog window, or about 400 pixels. You should
only take up this kind of screen space for an image that's worth showing off and, probably, devot-
ing a fair amount of your blog posting to talking about. A JPEG of this size might be as large as
160KB in file size. This might take as long as a few seconds to
transfer, even over broadband, which causes a visible pause in the
loading of your blog page.
When you create graphics for your blog, WordPress resizes them to
the sizes you define as the thumbnail, medium-sized, and large in
the Media Settings subpanel, as described in Chapter 2. You can
also use the actual size, which is our usual choice. The most valu-
able use for automatic resizing, to us, is to upload a larger file, and
then use the medium-sized version offered by WordPress so the
words can flow around the image smoothly within the blog
posting.
A few tips for creating images for use in your blog:
•
Use images. One of us (Smith) tries hard to use an image for
each and every blog posting.
•
Try to create the image size you need rather than using one
of the default sizes. The effect is likely to be better. Also be
aware: WordPress does not enlarge an image to one of the
default sizes for you; it only shrinks it.
•
Don't worry too much about compression. In particular,
don't compress too harshly when using JPEG, or you and
your blog visitors will suffer from an image that's visibly
worse.
tip
An experienced old-school web
graphics person would slide an
image with a large size “below
the fold,” far enough down on
the page that it wouldn't be
visible until the user scrolled
down. That way, the user
doesn't notice the delay while
the image downloads.
note
Graphics files are known by the
three-character file types that
Windows assigns to files:
.jpg
for
JPEG,
.png
for PNG, and
.gif
for
GIF. DOS and early versions of
Windows made you deal with file
extensions to do almost anything,
but more modern versions of
Windows hide them almost com-
pletely. Neither extreme is really
the right answer.
