Adding an image with link to your blog’s side bar

Adding an image with a link to your blog’s side bar is a great visual tool for promoting something within the blog, or for offering visual call outs to other websites. It is not quite as easy as a drag and drop tag cloud, however, it is not hard to do either, once you know a little bit of html code.

The first thing to do is to upload the image to your blog media library.

Make sure that the dimensions of the image will fit within your blog’s side bar dimensions. I would suggest keeping the image under 200 pixels wide. The image needs to be a png, jpg or gif image.
Click on the “Add New” under the Media bar in your wordpress dashboards left navigation (see image)

Once on the upload media page, click on the button to choose the files to upload, browsing for the image on your computer.

Once you’ve selected the file and upload it, copy the FILE URL. This is important. Select it, copy it, and paste it into a sticky note or a document so that you can retrieve it later. (see image below)

Now that you have the location of the image on the server, Save all changes and go to the Widgets area of your wordpress admin (under Appearance)

Then select the side bar that you want to place the image with link into – the left side bar (Sidebar 1), or the right side bar (Sidebar 2).

Find the text widget in your widget selections. click on the text widget, hold it down and drag it onto the side bar where you want the image to go.

Once you’ve dragged the widget to the side bar, click on the down arrow to open it up so that you can edit it.

Here is what you want to type:

(NOTE: When I say “image-location”, I am referring to the location of the image that you uploaded to your media library. You copied that location and saved it. When I say “link-url”, I am referring to the website address that you want to link to, be it a page on your blog or another website.)

<a href=”link-url“><img src=”image-location” border=”0″ /></a>

Tip 1: if you want the link to open in a new window, include  target=”_blank”   in the <a> tag.

For example, <a href=”link-url“  target=”_blank”><img src=”image-location” border=”0″ /></a>

Tip 2: Make sure to include the http:// at the beginning of your link-url. (see image below)

When you are done, hit the Save button.

Make sure to check it out on your blog to make sure it worked.

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