Thumbnails

Want more visitors to follow your links? You can increase the number of people who follow a particular link by making that link more interesting.

Suppose you're using this picture to illustate an article about reading for fun and you need to link to the article from your home page. You'd probably pick using a thumbnail image link over a text link because you know the photo will catch you viewer's eye - making it more likely they'll click on the link.

If you're like most webmasters, your thumbnails are just small versions of your photo. Lots of image editing programs make it easy to to produce thumbnails from every photo in a folder. But is the best way to get your website's visitors to click your links?

Most of the time, it's not! The more interesting the thumbnail, the higher your click-through rate. Reducing the image size reduces the image's impact - or worse, makes it too small to see what the photo is. Nothing says you have to reduce the entire image for your thumbnail. If you crop in tightly on the photo, you can show the subject large enough to attract your viewer's interest.

Take a look at our first thumbnail image. All we did was reduce the size of the original image. It was quick and painless. But, the image is so small, it's hard to tell that she's happy about reading.

Reduced size thumbnail Thumbnail highlighting subject


How do we fix that? Take a look at the second thumbnail.

Instead of reducing the size of the image, we just cropped it very tightly. We ended up with an image that was the same size as our first thumbnail, but now we can see our girl. And, we can tell she's a happy girl. Your website visitors will notice her much better in the second thumbnail than in the first. More website visitors who notice her on your page means more visitors who click-through to your article. And isn't that why you wrote it?