Friendly Wednesday: Blog Tips

Today on Friendly Wednesday, I am featuring another fellow mommy blogger, Melissa from Mommy Living the Life of Riley! who is way more tech savvy than I am and who has shared snippets of two great blog tips with us for managing graphics!

If you want to be featured on a future Friendly Wednesday, please let me know - just leave a comment saying you want to be featured!

My bio:

I'm a former Science teacher turned stay-at-home mom. My blog is about my interests now, such as parenthood, contests and sweepstakes. I always try to give my point of view on a variety of topics and infuse those opinions with plenty to make you smile! I’m reviewing products and hosting giveaways here too!

How to Add a Scrolling Image Bar to Your Blog!
I wanted to write this post tonight because it is a question that I get from a lot of my readers and it is a great tool for any blogger to use. This is a very convenient way to squeeze as much content onto your site without having a blog that continues on FOREVER! I want to try and explain in a few steps how you can turn your sidebar into a scrolling sidebar so that you can display an unlimited amount of graphics in a very small space. Before we begin, I want to admonish the following:
PLEASE DO NOT TINKER WITH YOUR HTML CODE IF YOU ARE NOT COMFORTABLE DOING SO.
REMEMBER TO BACK UP YOUR SITE BEFORE PROCEEDING:
First, you should decide wherever you'd like to install your new scrolling image bar on your blog. Most of the time, this will be done on a sidebar, but you could also easily use this code to create an image slide show in a post of yours as well as in the footer region of your blog too. Next, you should insert the following code above the images that you'd like to scroll together:

Read more here >>

Clean Up Your Graphics!
Today's "Tackle It Tuesday" theme is going to address how to make your blog load faster as well as give you many more search engine links. I'm fairly new to this whole blogging hobby, but I have been dealing with HTML code, in an amateurish way, for quite a while. I'm a big believer in making any website or blog more streamlined, because there's nothing worse than waiting for what seems like an eternity, for a page to load. I myself have left many people's blogs and have never returned, for just this reason. Everyone's time is valuable and what could be slowing your site WAY DOWN is the abundant use of graphics.

I personally enjoy visiting Website Grader (http://websitegrader.com/) to fully analyze my blog for free. Simply type in your blog address as well as your e-mail address, and Website Grader does the rest. It will give you an in-depth report on a full scope of issues and even give you a numeric "grade" between 1 and 100. My grade is currently a 73. When I first started, it was a 62. Here's what I did on "Tackle It Tuesday" to raise my score:

PLEASE DON'T TRY THE FOLLOWING IF YOU ARE NOT COMFORTABLE TINKERING WITH HTML CODE.
Also, make sure that you back up your blog page before continuing.

Find your image graphic HTML code on your site. Most of the time, this is very prevalent in your sidebars. Then, graphic by graphic, search the html code and see if there is an alt=" " code inside that html image code. If there is, then great! You do not need to do anything else. If there is NOT, then simply add it inside the bracket with a description of the graphic. Please see the example below:

Read more here 

Thanks for these great tips Melissa!  

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