How to Create Blog Featured Images
You know how important website images are. Can:
- Cut long text passages.
- Enhance a page's visuals.
- Refresh a brand's look.
- Storytelling can be simplified.
- Inspire visitors' emotions.
These aren't the only photographs to consider.
Featured photos, often called post thumbnails, summarize each web page. They're on your site and other platforms, too.
Choosing or editing featured photos poorly is like selecting an ugly or uninteresting book cover. How can you expect people to read your material if your photos don't grab their attention?
Today, we'll look at how featured photos communicate blog material outside the site and 5 techniques for developing more attractive and engaging featured images.
Why matter featured images?
Featured photos can be added to web, product, and blog pages. We'll focus on blog content today because it drives so much traffic (and leads).
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Here's a familiar example.
We includes a featured image above each blog post's description in the latest posts blog feed.
How to Create Blog Featured Images
Each graphic summarizes the post. The title and description snippet are optional for readers.
We uses the same photo that caught readers' attention in the blog feed to lead the blog post, as in this Google Analytics post.
Photos
This is wonderful since it establishes a consistent and clear visual identity for the blog post on any page or external channel.
On a website's main page, the featured image frequently promotes the current blog content. So it'll appear:
Consider where your featured photographs will display online. Because when your blog material competes with others for attention, the image will assist readers choose yours.
In RSS feed aggregators like Feedly, prominent photos appear.
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Feedly
Featured photographs can also show on Twitter.
Featured photos boost post views, clicks, and shares on social media.
Your mail designs should incorporate blog images.
Newsletter photos
Featured images in newsletters operate just like on social to attract readers' attention and motivate action.
How to Create Attention-Grabbing Featured Images
What else should you consider when developing blog featured photos besides size and resolution?
1. Style each major blog category consistently
Giving particular types or categories of material a distinct look could improve the blog's appearance and navigability.
Consider the BigCommerce blog.
Make It Big conference speakers' Executive's Corner posts include images like these:
How to Create Attention-Grabbing Featured Images
They all have a giant black banner promoting the 2020 event.
Any holiday-related posts will utilize this featured image layout.
Photo layout
Outside color and inner image vary, but "Holiday 2020" stripes and placement are constant.
Selling Online lessons show an ecommerce website, smartphone app, or social media platform. Comparable:
Selling online
The remaining photos that highlight ecommerce advice, technology, and news feature blue and purple tech banners:
Ecommerce blogs
BigCommerce gives each main content category a different appearance so readers can easily discover what they want.
This may not matter in the main blog feed. In places where they can't sort by category, like social media, RSS feeds, and newsletters, it matters.
2. Focus on subject to simplify layout
Make the image's subject the main (if not sole) attention to help readers understand your posts.
Example from L'Oreal Paris beauty blog:
Blog descriptions obscured
These three photos are featured. Can you tell me the page's category without the titles?
Knowing this is a beauty site and that each person has a distinctive haircut, you'd be right to infer this belongs under the "Hair" area.
Blog photos
Examine each image. Except for the centre, you can't see much background. Even then, the city is too blurry to be a distraction.
Layout your featured photographs by centering the subjects and fading out the background (if any). It will allow your readers to focus on the subject, not the surrounding stuff.
This doesn't preclude featured picture backdrops. It means that the post's focus must be front and center.
Once surrounding components distract from it, find a new photo.
Avoid white backgrounds
Without color or subject content, image backgrounds might go awry.
If your website's background is white or your featured images don't have a dark border, they may get lost.
You want readers to know where each blog post begins and ends. You also want to avoid distractions from your postings or other sites.
Delineating featured photographs from other content will help.
Example: The Engadget blog.
Avoid white backgrounds
Every featured image has a clear rectangular border. This ensures the blog's consistency.
Someone scrolling through the feed would undoubtedly pause here because of the floating smartphones. This may work for ecommerce product images, but not for a blog.
Lifehacker, like Engadget, includes product-focused posts. How it handles featured images:
Articles
The softly tinted background makes the Chromecast device and remote blend in with the blog content.
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