Great blogs have one thing in common: They are personal. There is a living, breathing individual writing the entries, and the blog reflects the author's creative personality. When readers visit a blog, they like to see some information about the author. To show that the blog's author cares about his/her readers, a the blogger's contact information should be readily visible. All this adds to a pleasant blog experience.

As you can see, I've added a little personal touch in the sidebar. A good way to show that someone cares about this blog is just to publish the blogger's name, a mugshot (in my case, too clear a shot might discourage readers from returning), and an e-mail address.

Here's how you add this to your Wordpress Ads Minded Theme:

Use a photo editor to create a 80×80 pixel mugshot of yourself. Feel free to use the advanced features to enhance your looks if necessary (in my case, photoshop crashes). Use the editor to create another image of about 130×35 pixels, this time with your e-mail address written on it. It's better to use a photo to publish your e-mail address than a real text link — this way the spammers' bots won't be able to snatch your e-mail address from your blog.
Save these as jpg files on your desktop.

Coming up with just the right size and color images can be tricky. I use a Mac, so I have it easy because Mac OS X has some great tools for just this sort of thing, namely DigitalColorMeter and Grab, and I use Keynote for image editing. If you have a Mac, just type those in Spotlight and get started. On a PC, you could use a freeware tool such as Irfanview. I haven't used Irfanview myself, but my buddies who use a PC swear by its name. Check it out.

Next, go to your host control panel / file manager or use FTP to upload the images to your blog root directory. If, like me, you use Bluehost, the procedure is as follows (see previous posts for detailed instructions on how to use the control panel):

In Control Panel, click File Manager. Navigate to your blog's directory (in my case it's public_html/innerblogger). Click on Upload file(s), and choose the file on your desktop. Upload both your mugshot and the e-mail address image.

In Wordpress, go to the Theme Editor again, and choose to edit sidebar.php. You'll see that there is an Author item. Make a copy of the Author item and paste it right after the original one, so you'll have two identical items. See the image below. Now, edit the code in the first two items so that the end result is as follows (see explanation at bottom of picture):

Explanation: Copy and paste the field painted grey so you'll end up with two similar blocks of code, the pasted block is painted yellow. Now, change the field painted green from 'author' to 'contact' in the pasted block. Remove the 'write something about your blog…' bit and add the code for your images as indicated in the fields marked orange. Add the

(painted pink) between the original and pasted blocks. Replace 'innerskier.jpg' with your mugshot file name and 'author.jpg' with your e-mail address logo file name. Finally, compare your code from the beginning of sidebar.php to the line saying

and make sure they are identical.

Now, just update the file and check that it looks OK. If it doesn't, verify that the code is exactly the same, and if it still does not look OK, e-mail me and attach the whole code for your sidebar.php and a link to your blog and I'll see if I can help.