Hi Everyone! Welcome to the new blog theme!  A couple things have changed with regards to the featured posts on the site (all for the better, I think), and I thought I should go them.

First of all, no more awkward cropping on the homepage! Images will display in their original ratios in the homepage and category feeds.

There is still some auto-cropping to be aware of though, and that’s what I wanted to go over.  The slider on the homepage will crop images into a very short, wide image, and the post pages themselves will crop them into a landscape photo, always positioning the cropped version in the center of the image.  I’ve used photos of my cats to illustrate.  The inner area is the slider image that the site will create, the area outside that is the post header, and the original ratio is what will display on the home and category pages.

For the most part, this will probably mean that square or landscape photos will make the best header images.  That’s not a rule or anything, just something to be aware of.

The slider doesn’t automatically display recent posts.  I will select the posts that are in the slider based on a number of things.  I’m going to try and use it to highlight posts that I think are most relevant to our readers, so, for instance, I might resurrect some swimwear posts from previous years during the summer, or will most likely display sweater posts in the winter.  The image issue is a big one here, as 1., the image crop is very narrow, which doesn’t work with most of the posts currently on the site, and 2., it’s the first thing readers see when they visit our site, so it needs to be pretty.  This means that if it doesn’t look presentable as a slide background, it most likely won’t end up on the slider.

Hope this all makes sense!  Feel free to grab the images below to use as a reference when sizing your own images, and let me know in the facebook group if you have any questions!

Examples:

1. Portrait

2. Landscape