I’ve been brows­ing the web search­ing for a way to add thumb­nails to my excerpts. When­ever I myself am look­ing through archives, cat­e­gories or what have you the first thing that’ll stand out is the actual image dis­played with the blog post. It’s one thing to make excerpts in the first place, enhanc­ing the user expe­ri­ence, while enabling him to quickly scan the con­tents of a sin­gle post. Adding a con­text image to the excerpt will make this even easier.

On the other hand it gives you the oppor­tu­nity to enhance your web­site visu­ally while at the same time draw­ing atten­tion to cer­tain posts you want to stand out. Recently a col­league of mine told me he clicked on an adver­tise­ment for the sole rea­son it was an adver­tise­ment dis­play­ing a water skier behind a fighter jet. It so turns out that peo­ple are just far more visu­ally stim­u­lated than tex­tu­ally, because text in itself doesn’t stim­u­late at all. On the con­trary, it might rebuke poten­tial read­ers from infor­ma­tional con­tent. Now I don’t pro­mote adding naked women to every blog post you write, but I can assure you it might very well do the trick of draw­ing more readers.

There are a num­ber of ways to intro­duce thumb­nails into your own web­site. The one I use is with the help of a plu­gin called thumb­nail for excerpts. After you’ve installed the plu­gin a lit­tle markup will be nec­es­sary to dis­play it the way you want to. That is if you aren’t sat­is­fied with the default settings.

Related posts:

1. Trou­bleshoot­ing your Word­Press site