Adding Images from Image Hosts

There are dozens of free image hosting services available on the Web these days.  In this demonstration we’ll use Google’s Picasaweb service and link an image from there to a page in our hobby Mega Mall.

We first locate the image in our online gallery we want to use in our Mega Mall. What we really want is the URL or Location of the image.

The next steps are similar in Firefox and Internet Explorer. Here’s both in screen shots to demonstrate.

An something like this in Internet Explorer…

Make sure to swipe (highlight) the whole location or address. For images, this will always start with http:// and end with .gif, .png or .jpg. Our homemade stout image from Picasaweb has a location that looks like this:

Once you press the CTRL key and C keys together you make a copy of the location to your computer’s clipboard. Now go to your Dashboard and to your WYSIWYG editor for adding the image to your Mega Mall page.

Start by clicking at the location where you want your image to appear.

Click the Insert Image button from the editor toolbar.

Swipe the initial http:// in the Image URL box (so it’s highlighted)

Paste the location URL from your clipboard by pressing CTRL and V together.

Now type some Alternate Text which briefly describes the image. (This  Alt Text is good for search engines too!) Choose how you want the image to be displayed (Left, Right etc.) and click the Submit button.

No matter where you keep your images online, you can use this method to have them appear in your pages, providing they are made public. Picasaweb, PhotoBucket, ImageShack are a few of these services.

Next we will look at adding a clickable link to an image.

Best wishes,

DotStartUp

Making an Image Clickable

In some cases you want to make an image clickable; after all a picture is worth 1000 words. The process of hyperlinking (or simply called linking) in the Mega Mall content editor is similar for images as it is for text. First you select what you want to link then click the Create Link button.  In our example, we’re going to add an affiliate link to the image we insterted before on our home brewing example page here. 

First we click the image we want to add a hyperlink to. Once the image is selected we will see its Handles.

Next we click the Create Link button.

The next step is to enter the URL.

It should be noted that you can paste a copied link from an affiliate program and it doesn’t have to be a link from one of the Mega Mall affiliate programs. For example it could link to Commission Junction, LinkShare or even be a non-revenue link to Wikipedia for example.

Paste or type in the hyperlink and click the Save button.

Finally and most importantly, check your link.  Click the View link above the editor and this will open the page your are workin on. When the page opens, check the image you just hyperlinked is ok and then click the image. Does it go where you expected it to go? If it does congratulations! If it does not, go and check your link.

Checking a Bad Link 

Somtimes humans make mistakes and it results in a bad link. Maybe a link is missing the ‘http://’ part or some other part of the link is malformed. Also, sometimes the page you want to link to has moved.

Links can often be pasted directly into your web browser’s address bar. Do that and click the green arrow to the right of the address bar.

If that doesn’t work, you have a bad URL and it needs to be corrected. Check the URL for anything that looks suspicious. When you have the correct URL, re-link the image by followin the steps above again.

This applies to text links as well as images…

Don’t forget to test your links!

Best wishes,

DotStartUp