1. Try working your creativity and make some humor out of it. Finding the idea would be more difficult than finding the right image. You have tons of these suiting any of your search criteria readymade for any situation. These custom made images can add a unique feeling to your blog and even the individuality you needed.
2. Resources for stock images: These are some of the copyright free image stock sites from where you can get the photos and images you need.
Flickr Creative Commons search: http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/
Photobucket: http://photobucket.com/findstuff/
Stock Exchange: http://www.sxc.hu/
Stockvault: http://www.stockvault.net/
3. Got your picture, now in order to increase the speed of loading there are a few options- for blogger users upload it in picassa, others in their own servers. Linking the image to another site would make some of your pictures blank when they remove the originals. Putting up the smallest thumbnail sized images would make the site load faster (clicking over it would take you to the original size).
4. The basic principle of picture placement is that the overall appearance of the blog should retain the interest of the reader. So here are a few good rules
- Small images are better aligned to left or right. With large chunks of text, the image better goes to right and if the text is minimal left would seem worthy.
- Large wide single images are best positioned in the top-center before the text for the post begins. It should instill a suspense in the readers and you can get them read the rest.
- Large multiple images are better placed at the center, though left would also be great. (never right)
- For news blogs it’s better to include a caption below the image as the pic itself may speak for you.
5. Editing the image before uploading is something you and me are reluctant with. But if you add that extra touch that makes it different from the rest of the ones, netizens will find that you are all too serious about your blog.
6. ALT tag of the image is something which gives the images their unique identity. If you do not put it there is no harm, but no use of course. Search engines find the images with this code (and actually, a major part of my traffic comes from image search) and so are the users who have blocked the images or using text based html browsers (especially when used by disabled users). The title tag pop-ups when you put your pointer over the image.
You may either put the tag in the Caption option provided while uploading/editing the image. In blogger this can be got by clicking the image button after selection.
Another way is to get the html code of the post and type something inside the quotes after finding or adding this html code (alt=”” and title=””) which is simple. The same thing can be applied to the pics of your blog template.
Not trying with these may seriously cripple your blog or website when it comes to search engine optimization and crawling. So take care of these from now on at least.
There would be many a readers who are not interested in reading a whole blog post, for those pictures will be more quenchable. Do not discard this group, as most of us belong to this category.
If you have any further ideas, you are welcome to comment about it and it will surely find its place in the post itself.
