Adding a Spot of Eye Candy to your Posts or Articles
Many bloggers try to write tons of content with pertinent keywords to get into search engines. While this is important, it is more important to remember the blogger is ultimately writing for humans!
To keep the aesthetic interest of the reader up, I think every post should have:
- Lots of white space—break up paragraphs into small, bite-sized pieces of 1-3 sentences each even if in normal writing they should be one big paragraph.
- Add small graphics to spruce up the page
It’s the second item I want to talk about. Doing simple text graphics like the one above (Today’s Tip) really brings attention to your post. Most any image editors should have the ability to play with text and different fonts.
If you don’t have a good image editor, I wrote a little about Gimp here. Gimp isn’t great for text, but for the price it can do a lot! I made the following image using Gimp:
To make this simply:
- Start with the rectangle tool
- Next click on the icon on the left as in the image below. This turns on the options for the Rectangle Select
- To get the rounded edges as in the above WordPress Tip image, just click on ‘Rounded Corners’ and adjust the Radius.
- Then create a new image and make a rectangle by dragging and hold the mouse click to the right rectangle size
- Next I use the gradient tool to create a nicer background effect than just a flat color
- Lastly, I add the text. I usually play around with different fonts and colors to find something that works.
Gimp doesn’t have as many nice text effects as PhotoShop, but if you don’t have $500 to spend, Gimp is awesome.
