Blog Exercises: Fix Images in Your Content

One of the most popular help requests on the WordPress forums is how to make the post text wrap around images. I wrote “Wrapping Text Around Images” in the WordPress Codex as a starting point many years ago.

I explain it further in “How to Add Images in Your Post Content” on Lorelle Teaches, going into great detail about image dimensions and file sizes, alignments, links, and attachments. And if you haven’t checked out the new WordPress Media Uploader and Manager, do so. It’s really sweet.

Your Blog Exercise today is to fix your images.

In this blog exercise, you are to learn more about how to embed images in your post content and do some image cleaning. My goal is to help you learn all the things you need to know about adding images to your posts and Pages so they are integrated into your site content rather than accessories or after-thoughts. A fine-tuned blog incorporates images into itself as part of the content, providing a balance between eye-candy and education.

This exercise has several parts.

1. Go through your site and remove or change all images that do not connect with your post or site content. Gratuitous images are a thing of the past. Not every post needs an image. Select images that connect the reader with your content and help tell the story.
2. If you have not used image alignment, do so now. Instead of leaving the images sitting dead in the center or along the left margins, let them float in the center to fill the width of the content column, or float to the right or left and let the text flow around them.
3. Update your images. What worked once might not be appropriate now. Look for images in your articles that are out of date such as tutorial images of WordPress or other software or web tips and techniques and update them. You don’t have to do all of them if you have many, just the ones on the most popular posts.
4. If you are not familiar with Attachment Pages, learn how they work and take advantage of them in previously published posts and future posts to allow the user to click a small version of the image and go to a post with the full-size image where they can leave comments on the image.

If you decide to blog about this blog exercise, remember to include a hat tip link back to this post to create a trackback, or leave a properly formed link in the comments so participants can check out your blog exercise task.

You can find more Blog Exercises on Lorelle on WordPress. This is a year-long challenge to help you flex your blogging muscles.

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