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How to get nice spacing round images in WordPress

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When you add images to a post or page using ‘Add Media’, WordPress jams them pretty tight up to the text.

image spacing graphicYou can tell it to align the image left, right or centre, but you can’t control the spacing. You can see how that ends up in the image opposite.

I don’t like that as a piece of visual design, and it’s not the best experience for the reader.

So I’ve adopted a standard operating procedure of setting the spacing manually for each image. Read on to find out how.

Quick notes

Note 1. If you’re comfortable with the idea of going into the files for your theme and altering stylesheets, you can set your own default options for WordPress to use. (Info here if that’s you.) But for most people that’s too hard to work out, and there’s a risk of messing things up. I’ve never been motivated to do it myself.

Note 2. Do try it the standard way without fiddling first, especially if you’re using a purchased theme. It may be that the folks who designed your theme have improved the standard spacing.

Note 3. If you want a text caption displayed with your image, eg for a photo, you might find this technique makes it go a bit weird and it’s easier to rely on default formatting.

Putting on the style

First, add your image via ‘Add Media’ and get it in basically the right place. Then we’ll tweak it so it ends up like the version here, which I hope you can see has more breathing space.

image spacing graphicIn the window where you write your post or page, there are two tabs at the top right: ‘Visual’ and ‘Text’. You’ve probably been working in Visual, which shows an approximation of what the page will look like. For this we need to go into Text.

Text mode shows you the guts of your page. Most of it is the text you’ve typed, but you’ll also see formatting instructions in <angle brackets>. Those are a blend of HTML, which tells the reader’s browser software what things go where, and CSS, which tells it the styles to use when it displays those things – size, colour, alignment and so on.   [Read more…] about How to get nice spacing round images in WordPress

Why web designers suck (and how to spot good ones)

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When I talk to people about their websites, it’s surprising how often they have a story of a poor experience with their web designer.

Surprised at screen graphicSome of them feel unsatisfied with the results, or bruised by the process, but powerless to do anything about it. Granted, those stories may have another side that I don’t hear.

But there are certainly all too many examples of sites that have a design company’s name at the bottom but are doing a poor job for their owners. (Who may not even realise it, assuming the designer has done it the best way.)

It singes my stoat to see good messages getting short-changed. So this post is to help people understand the territory better, hopefully leading to better working relationships and increasingly fab message channels.   [Read more…] about Why web designers suck (and how to spot good ones)

Some quick WordPress tips

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Been looking at some people’s WordPress sites recently. Here are a few basic tips for making things run smoothly.

Let the theme take the strain. A slogan that won’t win marketing awards… But the point of the theme and other appearance settings is to set them up once and then largely forget about them while you just fill in the posts and pages. So there’s a big decision (or several) up front to find the right theme, or get one custom made. Of course you can change your mind later, but the more funky customisation you’ve done, the more work will be needed to tweak a new theme.

Use styles. There’s a drop-down with styles for Paragraph (body text) and Heading 1 to Heading 6. Do use those rather than attempting to apply formatting to blocks of text individually. They’re an important part of what your theme does for you. Adding lots of different text sizes and colours that don’t fit in with the theme usually makes a page look less professional. In most cases you can handle it with headings plus adding bold to body text.

Plugin hygiene. There are lots of plugins out there doing all sorts of funky things. It can be good to try different ones and see whether they do what you want. But once you’ve decided one is not for you, do get rid of it again. Otherwise you risk ending up with a big list where you’re not sure what they all are and which are important. You only want to keep enough to add useful functions. That way your site will look nice and clean, and you’ll minimise the risk of extra code slowing things down or causing problems.

Don’t copy text straight from MS Word. If you use Word to draft pages, be aware that behind the scenes it adds all sorts of formatting codes to the text, in a rather inelegant and bloaty kind of way. If you copy and paste straight into a web page, those codes will often get included, interfering with your page formatting and making the whole thing much harder to work out if anyone looks at the page code to sort out problems. You can do a right click and paste as plain text, or copy into a program like Notepad that has no truck with word’s formatting, and then into WordPress.

Do check your site on at least one portable device. I fell foul of this recently – luckily someone pointed out that something wasn’t working properly. If you want to be thorough, try different browsers on the desktop too.

Do check links, Paypal buttons, etc. Nuff said.