Making sure my featured image looked right took as long as writing my post did yesterday.
I edited, resized, tested, deleted, then did it all again. All because of the magazine style of the template I had been using for this blog. It was not the first time that had happened and I was certain it was not going to be the last. I know the value of having a good image attached to a post when sharing out to social media, but when that gets in the way, something is wrong. So, yesterday afternoon I opted to change the design of this site to focus more on words and less on images. If you noticed the change before reading this, you’re either a stalker or your first name is Chase. Or both.
Since I already have a photo blog, the worry over featured images and how they were displaying on the front page of the site was silly, in retrospect. Now that I’ve made the change, I realize this is one of the reasons why I had never committed myself to writing each day in the past. The time required to get a post out the door was increased by my misguided focus on something that was adding very little value. It was just another excuse on a long list of excuses.
“Never again clutter your days or nights with so many menial and unimportant things that you have no time to accept a real challenge when it comes along. This applies to play as well as work,” Og Mandino famously exhorted. “You are not here to fritter away your precious hours when you have the ability to accomplish so much by making a slight change in your routine. [pq align=right]No more busy work. Leave time, leave space, to grow.[/pq]”
It’s time to do some spring cleaning.
This morning I’m going to take a little time to look at what else falls into the category of “featured images” in my life. I’m certain there are other actions I take on a daily basis that are being driven by a design that I can and should change. Identifying the meaningless clutter, the busy work, may be easier than clearing it out. But it has to be done. I’m tired of tripping over it.
Hi Jeff,
Different people have different audiences, but images do help you attract attention on social networks like Facebook, G+ and Pinterest. I just found out yesterday that Genesis does not automatically resize images and videos. That is not a good thing.
So now I’m researching plugins that do that and comparing that to changing themes again. Sad, because we chose Genesis because of their “mobile responsive” child themes. (Images and videos are the main thing we need to be mobile responsive! I’ve sent StudioPress an example of a theme that does it automatically. Maybe they’ll fix it.)
We don’t really need to publish every day. It can be better to spend one-third of our time publishing and two-thirds promoting and interacting.
Gail, thank you. I couldn’t agree more about images. This post has a featured image I put in specifically for sharing to social media, but I didn’t have to worry about how it looked on my site. It was nice, for a change. I think removing the clutter around my posts benefits the reader. At least on this blog. Also agree on the video part. My speaker video page ( http://www.jeffturner.info/speaking/speaking-videos/ ) benefits from a great plugin for making embedded videos responsive, fit vids for WordPress – http://wordpress.org/plugins/fitvids-for-wordpress/ As for writing every day… I have some thoughts on that, but I wanted to do it for a while so I could feel it and speak more clearly about it. I don’t have my thoughts collected yet, but my initial reaction to your comment about it is that you are likely right. Again, thank you.
I am probably doing something wrong. It takes me seconds to put an image in my posts. In my world they are not clutter but I do know what you mean by wasteing time on tasks that don’t matter. Nice to see you writing on a regular basis. 🙂
It was the template I chose, T. It takes me seconds to do it on my photo blog as well. 🙂 And thank you.