Adding images and links
Membership to the Learning Practitioners'
Association enables a trainer to have a profile on the TrainerBase web
site. As mentioned in previous articles there are 2 types of profile:
Basic and the Full Enhanced. I have already suggested what the potential
significant advantages to having the Full enhanced profile are and
tapping into these benefits are part of what I will cover in this
article.
In the previous article outlined:
In this article I will take populating a little further
with:
And in Future articles will provide tips on:
Edit pages of your profile:
This article is a continuation of where we left off with populating
your profile. You should be logged in to
Edit
Profile and in the section 'Edit pages of your profile'.
Adding an Image
It is said that a picture paints a thousand words. Whether that is
true or not; adding images to your profile can significantly improve the
aesthetics of what a purchaser sees when they visit your profile.
Basic principles:
In order to have an image display on your page, the file (usually
.jpg or .gif) must be stored on a freely accessible computer on the
World Wide Web. What this means is that you need to 'upload' the image
file to a web server; either on your own server or on someone else's
server. The specifics of doing this are varied and not part of this
article but the basic principles require the ability to conduct what is
called a 'file transfer' using a file transfer protocol (FTP) software.
When an image is on the Web it will have an address; a universal
resource locator (URL). To find out what this is right click (usually)
on any image on the Web and bring up its 'properties' or 'file info'.
The url will be something like http://www.domain.com/images/image01.jpg. This is the bit of text
that you are going to need to get an image into your profile.
The Page Editor:
In Edit pages of your profile, click on one of the pages in the drop
down list in the 'Select a page' field and click 'Edit >>'. The Page
Editor will appear. As mentioned in the previous article, this page
editor is quite basic but does have some useful functionality. To insert
an image into your page; place the text curser in the page editor widow
where you want the image to appear and then click on the second icon
from the right (the one that looks like a tree). If you hover over with
the mouse a text box will appear saying 'Add Image'. The resulting form
asks for the url of the image. Type in (or copy and paste) the image url
and click OK. Providing you have entered the correct url your image will
appear in the page editor.
A word of caution:
Do be careful of image size; the number of pixels in height and
width. If an image is too big (greater than about 500px wide) it may
alter the layout of your profile. If you have an image that is too large
but are not able to reduce it is size, send it to us and we will do this
for you. Alternatively you can set the display size of an image.
Image size:
Let us say that image01.jpg is 600px wide by 425px high. This is a
bit big and you want it to be 200 pixels wide on the screen. In the page
editor, the image has 8 little square markers; 4 in the corners and 4 in
the middle of each edge. By dragging and dropping these markers you can
change the size and shape of your image. Be careful not to alter the
aspect ratio (squash) your image. Dragging the corner markers will
maintain aspect ratio and resize your image properly.
If you wish to 'force' the display size of an image manually, tick
the 'View Source' option. The resulting text is what is called the
'Source Code' and is written in Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML). This
is the code that your web browser reads to display words and images on
your screen. Somewhere in this string of text will be the code that
relates to the image you have just added to the page. Using the above
example (image01.jpg) the string of text will be:
<img src="http://www.domain.com/images/image01.jpg">.
To manually force the width to 30%, say 200 pixels you can include
the following - width="200" height="141" , after the jpg" and before the
> in the text string (whilst viewing the source code). The result is:
<img src="http://www.domain.com/images/image01.jpg"
width="200" height="141"> .
Be careful if you are increasing the size of an image as this may
affect the resolution; your image will become what is called pixelated;
be made up of visible squares of colour.
When you have been working on your profile always remember to click
on the Save button. You will then be able to review what your profile
looks like in the 'Select a style for your profile' link in Edit
Profile.
Linking between sites
Basic principles:
One of the fundamental principles of the Web is the ability to
'hyper' link to other resources; pages on the web. This capability is
one of the significant benefits of the Full enhanced profile over the
Basic profile; you can link your TrainerBase profile to your own web
site. The concept is that you use a piece of text or an image as the
'hyperlink' so that by clicking on the text or image you are taken to a
different location. The different location is identified by its url,
much like the image but this time the file is a web page. You can
identify the url of all pages on the web by looking in the 'Address'
field near the top of your browser window.
Linking:
In Edit pages of your profile, click on one of the pages in the drop
down list in the 'Select a page' field and click 'Edit >>'. The Page
Editor will appear. To use a piece of text as the hyperlink; select it
and click on the third icon from the right in the toolbar (the one that
looks like a globe and chain). If you hover over with the mouse a text
box will appear saying 'Insert Link'. The resulting form asks for the
url of the page you want to link to. Type in the page url or better
still, copy and paste it from a browser that is on the page you want to
link to (e.g. http://www.yourdomain.com/index.htm) and then click OK. The text you
selected will become the link.
If you want to see what the code looks like for a link, put a tick in
'View Source' option. In the resulting source code you will find a
string of text like <a href="http://www.yourdomain.com/index.htm">My web
site</a> . And don't be frightened in creating lots of links to
different pages on your web site. If you have a page of clients, create
a link from your TrainerBase profile to your Client page <a href="http://www.yourdomain.com/clients/index.htm">My
clients</a> . The options are limitless.
Reciprocating:
The Full enhanced profile on TrainerBase is web enabled (it looks
like a web page) and search engine optimised (more on this in future
articles). TrainerBase and member profiles get spidered/indexed by
search engines and one thing that search engines like is links to and
from web sites. The fact that there are links in both directions
demonstrates a level of legitimacy and improves the ranking of both
sites. When you create a link on your TrainerBase profile to your own
web site, do put links on your web site back to TrainerBase. Your
reciprocal link can be to the home page, a page of interest to visitors
of your site such as the Downloads or perhaps direct back to your own
profile. To do this you would need to add the hyperlink code to your own
web site along the lines: <a href="http://www.trainerbase.co.uk/vip/myprofile">my
TrainerBase profile</a> .
New windows:
And finally, if you want to load the linked page into a new window
rather than the same window you can edit the html code by adding -
target="_blank" between the htm" and before the > .
The result is:
<a href="http://www.yourdomain.com/index.htm"
target="_blank">My web site</a>
Adding images and links to your TrainerBase profile has now taken
your presence on the site to another level. In the fullness of time; and
this can be from a few days to a few weeks, your rankings on the
internet will start to rise. In the next article I will go into more depth about how you can
increase your chances in getting those search engine robots indexing your profile
and your own web site and getting you even further up the search
rankings. Remember TrainerBase gets over 15,000 robots a month indexing
the site; you should use this traffic to help your presence.
If there is anything else you would like to know about what the
Association is doing to benefit its members please feel free to contact us.
