Daily Archives: February 23, 2008

e-maginings: Picture This

I’m currently taking Suzanne McMinn’s online class Color Me Blogging, sponsored by OCC RWA. It’s a great class and we’re all learning a lot.

One of the things we discussed is putting graphics in blogs and whether readers like them or not. The only downside I can see if for people with slow modem connections as the graphics take longer to download than plain text. I spend part of the week at a location with a modem connection and I basically turn off “download images” just to speed up my internet experience. It’s not as much fun, though.

One thing you can do to make the pictures download faster is to resize them to a smaller size, say 200-300 pixels high. I use Paint Shop Pro to do that.

If you don’t have a personal picture to illustrate your blog, there are online stock photo sites where you can pick up pictures relatively inexpensively, if not free. My favorites are:


http://www.bigstockphoto.com/
http://www.dreamstime.com/
http://www.istockphoto.com/index.php

You can register for free at all of them, but you have to buy download credits to purchase the photos. The cost of the credits ranges from $1.00 to app. $2.50. The cost of the photos generally varies by size, with the smallest costing one credit and larger ones running At iStock photo, there’s always a free image of the week, plus their dollar bin section where every picture costs one credit. Dreamstime.com has a large section of free graphics. The picture in this post is a free graphic I downloaded from dreamstime.com because I loved it, but didn’t know what to do with it, so I’m sharing it here.

So, what do you think? Do you like photos with your blog entries or not? If so, small or large graphics?

Linda McLaughlin w/a Lyndi Lmaont