It seems like some of the biggest gay porn blogs use those huge photo collage images in their posts… you know, the ones with a bunch of promo photos all edited together into one long column image. I was wondering what the logic is behind this and why its better than just inserting individual photos in the post.
It seems like it would take a lot more time to create the collage because you have to use Photoshop or whatever to make it, right?
And do they result in better conversions than just posting individual images?
Or is it all just a style preference thing, or a case of one mega-blog doing it and everyone else copying them?
There must be some reasons why these are popular because so many bloggers use them. Someone enlighten me!
Re: The logic behind large photo collages in blogs
I started off inserting thumbnail galleries, but when I switched to long collages, my sales went up.
I don’t think there’s a huge difference in inserting individual pictures over collages, however, a couple of points.
If you insert individual pics with a link on each one, that’s a lot of outgoing links. You could wrap them all in one link, but apparently that’s not correct HTML.
With individual pictures you’ll end up with 10 or 12 pictures that are watermarked. The more the surfer sees the site name and url, the more likely they are to type it in. At least with collages you can get rid of the watermarks and put the site name on your collage once.
Finally, the trend used to be to put the long collages on your blog’s homepage, but now the trend is to put a shorter collage or one image on the homepage and get the surfer to click into the post to see the full collage. This helps with bandwidth and improves bounce rate.
Re: The logic behind large photo collages in blogs
i stick with a collage as there are so many browers and monitor sizes, from mobile to massive. i’ve seen pics broken up on smaller screens - and how small is too small depends on the pages as well as the size of the pics - while the collages simply resize to fit the screen.
Re: The logic behind large photo collages in blogs
It’s an interesting question. We actually switched to collages recently for a lot of blogs, for some of the reasons already mentioned.
However…
How many people now use image search in Google? Instead of seeing nicely detailed individual images, they’ll get one small thumb of the collage. You also have to consider that ten images in a post will offer more coverage in Google image results than one collage with one tag.
Perhaps adding individual images, with appropriately varied tags, and without links out to the sponsor on those images is actually a more ideal method?
Re: The logic behind large photo collages in blogs
Thanks for the feedback everyone and keep the comments coming!
I’m not sure what to do about this because upon looking into it further I found two mega-blogs that use collages (waybig and queerclick) and two that appear to use mostly individual images (jasoncurious and gaypornblog).
So maybe there isn’t a consensus on this afterall?
Personally I like how collages give a site more of a “magazine” feel, but I need to justify the extra time it will take to make them. It looks like Queerclick has a whole staff who can do stuff like this!
Re: The logic behind large photo collages in blogs
I really think once you get the hang of making collages it doesn’t take all that much time to do them, as long as you don’t make collages that combined too many different size photos. The time it takes to resize, rename, upload and link all those separate images wouldn’t be much quicker then making a simple collage.
I thought it is perfectly correct in HTML. Do you have any URL explaining why it is not correct? Every day I learn something new here :)[/QUOTE]
I’d be disinclined to use HTML code like that. You can probably make it significantly more semantic and precise - I’d try to arrange multiple images in an unordered list (<UL> tag) and style the <LI> elements with CSS.
I thought it is perfectly correct in HTML. Do you have any URL explaining why it is not correct? Every day I learn something new here :)[/QUOTE]
Misunderstanding. There is nothing wrong with doing that but it doesn’t work on my blog because of CSS styles.
Main reasons that I choose to use blog collages:
Load times - with a collage the browser only request a single image instead of several. It saves resources and loading times. You’re supposed to always minimize the amount of external files (including images) each page requests.
Less code - similiar to above, you save on amount HTML used for each blog entry. (what can I say, I’m a minimalist)
Style - I prefer the look of a single collage on commercial blog entries. Non commercial posts we’re more flexible on format on GayDemon. (saying that I can often prefer the single image look on blogs)
Size - In theory it should save file size by using a collage instead of individual images.
Storage - When you have a very large site file storage and amount of files can become a problem. GayDemon has over 7000 archived blog posts… each one uses images. If I used 6 images on each post that would be 42,000 image files.
But really… it’s down to personal preference. It’s whatever works for you.
