One of the easiest ways to make your blog look much more interesting is to include a picture in amongst the text to both make the post look more attractive and also to illustrate what you are actually writing about. I take many pictures with my camera solely with this end in mind, and of course if you are writing about news stories or current topics, you can also insert pictures relating to that subject matter as well. As an example, in order to illustrate these How to posts, I take a snip of the program,menu or feature that I am trying to explain and show how to use by making use of the snipping tool which can be found in Vista, then I can more easily show that feature or menu in this post.
So lets go ahead and place a picture inside the text of your blog.
In the Menu list on the right hand side of the compose screen, under the INSERT list, you will find INSERT PICTURE, so select this and Windows Live Writer will then show all of your picture files so that you can select one to insert. So go ahead and select one of your pictures from the folders stored on your computer.
I am going to select one that I took during our recent trip to Scotland to illustrate this post. Note that the picture will be inserted where your cursor is currently placed inside your text. If you aren’t happy with where the picture has initially been placed inside the text, then just right click on the picture and choose CUT and the picture will then be deleted from the post, and you can then choose to insert it somewhere else instead. Once selected the picture will be inserted INLINE into your composing area by default. However you don’t have to leave it in that position, you can place it anywhere inside the post and also have your text ‘wrap around’ the picture in the process.
In order to enable that to happen just click on the picture and the Menu on the right hand side of the Compose screen will then change to the PICTURE MENU where you will find all of the cool things that you can do with your picture. The first choice in the Menu under the PICTURE tab is LAYOUT and this will currently say INLINE, so click on the small black arrow to see the other choices and then choose LEFT. Now any text that you have written will now magically ‘wrap around’ the picture to the right of it. At first it might look a little messy as the words will be ‘butting’ right up to the side of the picture and making it look crowded and unattractive as you can see here.
So lets change that. Click on the picture to bring up the PICTURE MENU, and under the PICTURE tab you will see MARGINS which is currently set to NO MARGINS by default. Click on the small black arrow and then select CUSTOM MARGINS. We need to stop the text from going right up to the edge of the picture so we need a margin to be placed on the right hand side. By clicking on the small UP arrow under RIGHT, we can then place an ‘invisible’ margin around our picture which moves all the text to the right and looks much more attractive and easier to read. I have set mine to 10 but you should try other numbers and watch the results as the text moves to the right of the picture!
Next lets put some text underneath the picture itself so that when our readers click on the picture they will get a description of it. Click on the picture to bring up the PICTURE MENU, then click on the ADVANCED tab. At the bottom of the offered choices, you will see OTHER and ALTERNATE TEXT. Just click inside the text area which in my case contains the pictures reference number, delete that and then write a description or caption for the picture. I have put ‘gazing out over the Loch’ in mine. Now readers of this blog will see this text when they click on top of the enclosed picture which will give them some extra information to access.
Try inserting a picture into the text of your blog, and see for yourself just how much more attractive it now becomes by making the whole post much more interesting to read. Try moving the picture to the right or place it in the centre of your text. Note that when you place your picture in the centre, the text will not wrap around it but will be placed above and below the picture. You can always cut it out from the post if you are not happy with the final result. So do experiment with this won’t you?
Next post we will do some more exciting things with pictures inside your blog to help to make it more attractive and readable.
TG 
Remember, if I can, you can!
