Adding the Power of Visuals to Your Blog or Web Site
We live in a visual world. Social Media advocates can take that for granted. They are pleased to get a few hundred thoughtful words together to publish a few times a week. Add a picture? That will take too much time!
A search for "mustard seed" in photopin.com helped find this photo. At the end of the post look for the photo credit, cut and pasted into the html. It took less than two minutes to find the photo and add it to this post.
Fortunately for us, there are media elves who specialize in analyzing our work. Elves like pictures and videos. When they start counting on their little green fingers they report that blogs using images and videos chalk up higher statistics. More people read them. Search engines find them more easily. Listen to the elves!
There are many inexpensive sources of art. istock images can cost as little as $2. But here is a source that is mostly free. All you have to do is add a credit for the image at the end of your post. You don’t even have to type. Just copy and paste the code.
Their catalog is vast. The trick for church bloggers is to come up with the right words to find a suitable image. You may have to play around a bit.
For example, a search for “The Good Shepherd” brought up a few religious images but a lot of images that were nowhere near topic. They may have been images of people with the name “Good” or “Shepherd.”
Better results came with different search words. “Stained glass windows” worked well.
Search engines can also help you. Use Google, Yahoo, etc. and click on the IMAGE tab. You’ll have to look at each image that comes up for copyright. It’s a good idea to always credit the source.
You can scan your own images or use your cell phone creatively for images. Objects around the house can add interest. In one of our earlier posts, we used an image of grapes to go with a phrase we had used in the post “sour grapes.” We bought that image from istock for a couple of bucks but we could have taken a cell phone photo of images of grapes from our own refrigerator.
Captions are not always necessary but they do give search engines one more thing to find. If the visual connection to your post is not obvious, write a caption.
Start to think visually. It will help prepare you for the next step . . . video.
photo credit: moominmolly via photopin cc