A very important part of your ActiveRain blog is your profile page. In a recent post, I discussed all sorts of things to consider for your profile photo. Now let’s look at the Cover Photo. I’ll follow with another post soon digging into the particulars of setting up your cover photo.
In this post, I went surfing the ActiveRain profile pages looking for cover photos that we can use for inspiration. I came back with 40 covers as a comprehensive sampling of what can be done. I’m handing out gold stars today as you’ll often find me doing. Well done to those that I came across in my search and got me to click to save in my gallery! :)
Here are the basics to know about your cover photo for starters. Your cover photo should be a minimum 600 pixel x 200 pixel image. If you do a little math, that means it is three times wider than it is tall. That is a wider aspect ratio than your camera shoots. Therefore if you take a photo from your library and upload it directly to ActiveRain, the system is going to have to chop off a little and an equal amount from the top and the bottom of the image. Just keep that in mind as you pick your photo. You can of course do a custom crop (in a photo app) if the automatic crop is cutting off elements not to your liking. I’ll show that in a future post about how that would work.
As you can see from my inspiration selections below, I’m looking at a few particular things.
1) It represents and features something local for you – you are a service provider and an expert in your area, show it!
2) It is not overly cluttered with too much going on (e.g. logos and text, or too may images stacked into the frame)
3) Either no text or minimal text. As you can see in context, all your contact information is right below so duplicating it on the image could be redundant and distracting. If you want to put text, do it minimally with your most important contact feature whether it be your website address or phone number. Sometimes your tag line as text on the photo also is a nice touch.
4) Selection of the background color theme – orange or blue. Pick a color that compliments the photo selected.
And now without further ado, let me share my inspiration board!
(you can click on any of the images to jump to that profile page)
Alan
Andy
Barbara-Jo
Belinda
BLiz
Bob
Brad
Brenda
Catherine
Christine
Cindy
Dagny
Debbie
Donna
Dorie
Gabe
Gayle
Ginny
Janis
Jeff
Jennifer
Karen
Karen
Kathleen
Kathy
Kathy
Kristal
Kristen
Loreena
Lottie
Maureen
Michelle
Mimi
Mona
Myrl
René
Richard
Tammie
Tammy
William
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