How to add pictures to your sidebar

This is one of the only areas in which you CAN mess up your website:  TEXT widgets.  Some of you lovely ladies are quite risk friendly and love to play with your websites.  This message is for you:  be careful! For our readers who are scared to touch their blogs for fear of breaking something, this message is for you:  this is one of the ONLY ways you can mess up your blog. 

Using text widgets gives you great  flexibility with your sidebar.  You can punch whatever code in there, or images, or text.  And up it will pop – in your sidebar.  EXCEPT, please be careful with putting code in here.  Unless you are quite familiar with html or php, you can mess up the entire look of your blog.  Approximately 40% of the troubleshooting jobs that I complete, are caused by incomplete code put into a text widget.  I strongly recommend copying and pasting the code that you want in your text widgets.  And here’s how you do that:

1.  Find that cute button or image that you want.  (I’ve used this image before, but really, can it ever be too much?) 

2.  Upload that image to photobucket or another photo hosting service.  For our example, I’ll use Photobucket.  Click on “Share”.  Click on “MySpace”.  Copy the link at the bottom of the screen.  It will look like this:

<a href=”http://s284.photobucket.com/albums/ll40/o2cathy/?action=view&current=reg3.jpg” target=”_blank”><img src=”http://i284.photobucket.com/albums/ll40/o2cathy/reg3.jpg” border=”0″ alt=”Photobucket”></a>

3.  Replace the greyed out link above, with the link you want.  Be sure to include “http://”  in your link.  So if this picture was to be linked to the “How to Hire a Gardener” blog, the code would look like this:

<a href=”http://myblog.com/how-to-hire-gardener” target=”_blank”><img src=”http://i284.photobucket.com/albums/ll40/o2cathy/reg3.jpg” border=”0″ alt=”Photobucket”></a>

4.  Now paste the above code into a text widget.  You can give it a title if you want:  How to Hire a Gardener.  Save the widget.  Don’t forget to save the sidebar (button at the bottom of the widget list).

That’s it!  You should have one of those cute badges on your sidebar, with a link to the blog or article of your choosing.

Filed under a light brush of code · Tagged with Cut copy and paste, Photobucket, sidebar, text widget, widgets