Featured

As I was planning a post for this blog – something I don’t do very often – the unexpected happened. A bit of fame interfered.

There are a bunch of blogs in my “personal cloud”, they are somewhat organized, although my readers might argue that. Sometimes a topic fits logically into more than one “corner” and there will be posts in several blogs. This happened recently with a photo walk in Midtown Atlanta and again now with posts about the Atlanta British Car Fayre 2016. For This ‘n That, here, I wanted to discuss how to pick a “Featured Image” to lure readers to look in.

Let’s take a look at some of my photos.

All nice photos, at least in my humble opinion. The “Mosaic Gallery” presents images nicely and in a neat compact form. You can click on any photo to take you to a slide show. But all this is already well into the post. Getting readers to come this far is the trick and to a large extend the job of the “Featured Image”. That is the photo that shows up in the WordPress Reader as well as any Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and other social media sites that are “fed” the post.

The “Featured Photo” must be captivating. It should also create a desire to see more of the story. Something should be happening in the photo that tells part of the story so readers will click to see the rest. For this post I selected the bagpipers marching between classic British cars. Hey, it got you here, didn’t it? Here it is again.

There is another reason for selecting this picture. That is the aspect ratio. Each of the social media sites has its on quirky way of handling images. Invariably the image that is used will be cropped. Some crop them square, some wide. The photo should lend itself to be mangled in those various ways without suffering too badly. You don’t want peoples’ heads to be cut off. So pick carefully.

That’s my message. You are welcome to discuss it with me in the comments. Did you like the selfie I sneaked in?

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Oh, about that bit of fame. It may well be that you came here via a link from Blogging Meetup. This blog came up in the Like, Follow, Share Challenge for the week of 9/12. Thank you Eric!

If you are not familiar with Blogging Meetup do investigate it. It is a wonderful place for meeting fellow bloggers and for getting inspiration.

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As I said, my topics spread over several blogs. For more on the British Car Fayre see:

Headlight – Gallery Ludwig

British Windows – Two Cameras – Two Views – (more to come here)

[other posts not yet published]

.:.

© 2016 Ludwig Keck