Adding a Gallery to your Self-hosted WordPress Website – part 2

Part two our guide on ‘adding a gallery to your self-hosted WordPress website‘.

Previously we had covered the NextGEN Gallery plugin, now we provide useful related advice.

If you require a WordPress developer or designer, please get in touch.

How many images to use per blog posts.

Place too many images into a gallery and you run the risk of visitors feeling they’ve spent too much time on your website already, by the time they finish viewing the whole gallery.

Include too few and you might fail to present yourself properly.

For many choosing ten images could be the ideal amount.

If you have a large collection of images to choose from, then hopefully it is possible to find ten images that are not only high quality, but also worthy of your gallery.

Example: If you had thirty to forty photos taken, ten images hopefully will represent different aspects of the event.

So instead of many of the images appearing similar instead: a story, a message, a sense of atmosphere or branding might instead become apparent.

However if you don’t have ten great images, then don’t be tempted to include images not worthy of the gallery, instead present your stronger offerings.

Optimise your images before uploading.

Many people forget that not everyone is sporting fast broadband connections around the world or indeed in the same country.

In the UK for instance there is Adsl, cable, dial-up, fibre, isdn, mobile and various wifi technologies.

The wifi technologies themselves might be reliant on a mixture of technologies all producing different results via the wifi connection.

So it is highly important you find the right balance for your image optimisation.

Images that are 3000+ in pixel size will probably be resized anyway by the gallery plugin, depending on your configuration, so uploading images already optimised will help your hosting performance and your visitors.

Generally resizing images by 1024x width is a good ballpark figure to use, but that obviously depends on who your target market is.

If you are tailoring specifically for the mobile phone and tablet world, then 1024x is probably currently unsuitable.

However most websites are still primarily catering to the desktop and laptop world, so 1024x is okay.

However always keep your originals, as you might find you will need them one day to upgrade your galleries to cater to new requirements.

Where to place the images in a blog post.

Unless you are a news website, galleries are generally placed at the bottom of a page or post.

However you should choose a presentation style right for your website.

Instead of a gallery being an additional piece of content to supplement a page or post, the gallery could be the main attraction at the top of the post, then with three to four hundred words below, providing detailed background about the images in the gallery above.

Find out what style works best for you, rather than emulate your peers.

If you require website optimisation help,

please get in touch.