This is an online photo sharing site.  When you use their online photo sharing, you can create albums to organize your pictures according to your needs. You can add tags to find certain pictures easier. Tagging people is made easy with their face recognition software.

How much is it?

Their free option allows you to upload up to 1 GB worth of pictures. People with lots of large, high quality pictures may want to upgrade to the paid options which range from 20 GB to 16 TB. You can edit pictures online without having to buy expensive photo editing programs with Picnik, their partner. Most features are free.

What is this going to do?

If you have large high quality pictures you do not want to load them to your website because they will slow your site down. You can use the “add image” in your posts and use the URL. Copy the image location and size down to what you need for the post. You can have the image link to the “original image” which will allow readers to see the original image.

Even if your images are not big, think about this. Each image you load takes up some memory, after a year or several that’s quite a bit of memory that may be used. This will allow the images to be stored elsewhere which will keep your website running faster and smoother.

How do I add pictures?

With WordPress you probably already know how to click the little box that looks like a picture above your post that you are entering. Normally when you click that box you might upload from your computer, instead you are going to click the “From URL” tab that is at the top of that popup. You will want to right click the image you want from Picasa and copy the Image URL, this phrase is slightly different on each browser.

Tomorrow will cover how to add a slideshow! 

Live ♥ Laugh ♥ Love

MJ Schrader

Of course not!  Here are 7 options just for you!

1. NextGen Gallery is probably the most popular WordPress Photo Gallery plugin. Create a slide show, a media RSS feed and more. Easily move, copy, upload and delete images. You can even add a flash photo gallery.  See the NextGen Gallery video

2. Featured Content Gallery is a photo gallery WordPress plugin. It allows you to create an automated, rotating image gallery on any post or page. It is very easy to integrate and you simply add a field where you want the gallery to display. Choose from dozens of options to customize according to your website.

3. Flickr Gallery is a great photo plugin if you use Flickr. With their shortcodes system your pages and posts can quickly and easily have your Flickr images incorporated. You can turn on database caching for faster loading.

4. WP Photo Album easily allows you to manage WordPress photo albums. Create albums and move photos to and from them. Upload and delete photos and add a bit of code to post your album where needed.

5. Lazyest Gallery with a name like that, how can you not like this WordPress plugin? It creates thumbs and slides automatically. Easily manage comments per image or folder. Arrange your images and folders as you wish and handle many other details as you see fit.

6. Shutter Reloaded is an image viewer but is minimal in size. It will resize large images, combine images in sets and pre-load images for faster display. You can customize background and color for captions, buttons and menu.

7. Lightbox 2 allows viewers to see a larger image in a unique format. Once an image is clicked it will pop up and the rest of the page will darken. Load times remain almost the same.

Tomorrow I will cover one more option.  It is not a plugin so it will need a bit more explanation than these do.

Live ♥ Laugh ♥ Love

MJ Schrader

Please thank Donald Tregde for this post!

http://MJSchrader.com

You want your WordPress site to look recognizable and be comfortable. If the blog has annoying colors or looks juvenile, your readers may turn around and leave. If your readers can not read the blog, such as what happens when the background and the font color are too close or are a hard to read combination, then readers will leave.  The cigar theme on a healthy living blog makes your readers wonder what kind of healthy living are you really going to cover.

Are you cluttered?

If your website has too many things, people will not know where to read, where to visit or where anything is.  The readers will be too easily distracted to stay and read your posts or if it is really cluttered, they may just leave the website.  And you know that Pay per click ad you just put inside the post?  Well, people have learned one of two things, to ignore it or ignore the writer, a non-win or lose situation.  If you are not going to win, why have it?

Do you have WordPress?

There are great themes that allow you to customize almost every color on the website. This allows you to match your vision and work to make certain it is appealing to visitors.  I will cover those tomorrow.

Live, Laugh, Love,

MJ Schrader

Actually not always.  There some fabulous and fun ways to get more website traffic for your online business. By having fun in generating traffic, your traffic is likely to view your business as a friendly business which helps increase sales.

The notebook that inspired the look and feel of my brand.

Use Photos.

There are several photo-sharing sites that also link directly to search engines.  Add tags related to your business and when people search images for those words your pictures and website appear.  Also if you are on my Twitter stream or Facebook you probably have seen that I take almost daily pictures with my phone.

Create a presence on social media.

Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and others are known as social networking sites. The key being social interaction, but this also means networking with the friends of friends, just like business networking builds your business. You need to interact with people and build a presence but this is as simple as adding pictures and videos that you created from the previous two.

Create a fun avatar.

Blogs, forums and other sites allow you to add a miniature image called an avatar. If your avatar is animage of you having fun people may click it, to learn more about your website.

What other ways can you create?

Think about ways to create more website traffic. What do people enjoy, how can you help others, there are a number of ways to generate traffic and plenty of ways to add some fun.

Live ♥ Laugh ♥ Love

~ MJ Schrader

Menus

Have you ever wished you could just quickly add a new tab to your menu? Now you can!

Not all themes accept the menus option, but this impressive feature will soon be something theme developers will add. If your theme accepts it great, if not you can visit Widgets, Appearance, and drag the Custom Menu to your sidebar. Just visit Appearance then Menus.   What you see on the right side will look similar to what you see below.

Adding to Your Menu

This is impressive. Many of my clients want to link different blogs and websites. With “Custom Links” you type in the web address, called URL, and then add a label for the menu. You can check mark various pages to be added to your menu or scroll down and check the categories you want added.

Change Your Menu

Then over on the right on the new menu you can create a custom name. Click the down arrow beside the menu item and you can change the “Title Attribute” or “Navigation Label.”  You will also notice you remove the item or cancel the change you made.  Drag and drop the menu to rearrange it, even move an item a bit to the right to make it a sub-menu item.

Of course the themes that support this are limited.  You can upload the brand new Twenty Ten theme created by the WordPress staff to use this feature.  You can also add to your sidebar as noted previously.  Either way the ability to create a unique to you menu is absolutely delicious.

~ MJ Schrader

PS.  Tomorrow you can read about other features.  If you want me to go into the features of the new Theme Twenty Ten please comment!  And please comment with your favorite features!

PPS Save 25% off my products?

You can save 25% off any product this special page.  You have until July 17th!

During Check Out use Coupon Code: PatSpecial610

The Delay in Release

WordPress 3.0 was supposed to have been released May 1, 2010.  One for the delay is they want to take a break from updating the program, so they wanted it correct.  The “Break” according to the WordPress.org site…

Over the next three months we’re going to split into ninja/pirate teams focused on different areas of the around-WordPress experience, including the showcase, Codex, forums, profiles, update and compatibility APIs, theme directory, plugin directory, mailing lists, core plugins, wordcamp.org… the possibilities are endless.

So expect bigger and better experiences in all things WordPress.

What are the WordPress 3.0 features?

There is a bit of a rub there. Some of the much talked about features are more for developers than for most WordPress users. This is not to say that users have been left out, in fact what has been added has been wonderful.  But for today I am going to talk about features for regular users.

Regular User Features

The features for regular users is the ability to create menus and short links. One feature that stands out to me is being able to upgrade all your plugins at once.  WordPress 3.0 has upgraded the image editor so you can crop, flip and change the size of your image.

You should notice the screen and dashboard look cleaner. This is not a big thing, but it is a visual difference.  There are many other differences that are similar to the dashboard.  Just minor changes that make user experience a bit better yet are not that noticeable.  For a complete list visit: WordPress Codex.  This is a complete list but it is Geek.

The added features have just made WordPress even easier to use and made it an even better program.  Tomorrow will be how to use your new features.

~ MJ Schrader

PS Below is a video from WordCamp in San Francisco.  My goal is to go to a WordCamp next year.

Flash Intro

That “cool” introduction flash, movie or other introduction can make readers mad. It may not load. It may take too long to load. It can be flashy and glitzy enough to cause problems with the browser the reader is using. It could cause problems with the operating system.

LOUD COLORS

This is a surprisingly common mistake. That brightly colored website may look great to you, but what about to your readers. Your readers also want to be able to see different parts of your website. If they can not tell the sidebar from the header, or the body the side becomes hard to understand.

Font Color Vs Background Color

The light pink font on your light blue background is very hard to read. So is the pale gray on your white. A high contrast between the background color and the font is very important.  That is why so many blogs have either a black background with white writing or white background with black writing.

Hopefully this will explain some very important reasons people leave websites in a hurry!

~ MJ Schrader