Put a Photo in your Sidebar

Adding a photo or image to your sidebar is a great way to make information stand out or to point the way to important information. Using widgets, you can put all kinds of things in your sidebar as well as the usual categories, pages, recent posts, blogroll etc.

You could add a photo of yourself, a photo from a post with a snippet of text linking to that post, a photo of a new product, a book review, a membership logo or anything else you want to put in front of your audience. If you look at the sidebar on this blog, you will see that I have added a screenshot of the latest website I have designed with a link taking people to it.

To add an image to your sidebar, you need to be able to

1) resize the image you want to use to the exact size (in pixels) you want it to appear (you don’t want it to be wider than your sidebar or it will play havoc with your page layout)
2) Have widgets available as part of your blog’s theme
3) Know a little bit of html code (which I will teach you below).

How to Add an Image to Your Sidebar

You need to upload your image first, then…

1. go to Manage/Uploads
2. Select the image you want
3. Click on the link text button
4. Copy the link url (appears top field on the right)
5. Go to Presentation/Widgets and create a new text widget
6. Enter html code below and replace the link url, hyperlink (if you want one) and alt text etc altered to suit.

Code to display photo only

<img src=”http://nzwebsites.files.wordpress.com/2007/09/pepwebsite.jpg” alt=”Parenting Enhancement Programme Website”>

Download code for photo linked to website or blog page

<a href=”http://www.parent-help.co.nz” target=”_blank”><img src=”http://nzwebsites.files.wordpress.com/2007/09/pepwebsite.jpg” alt=”Parenting Enhancement Programme Website”></a>