Ever wonder how to get those cool avatars to display on your WordPress blog, either as author images or in your comments?
I always recommend that clients use Gravatar. What is Gravatar you may ask? Gravatar is a service that lets blogs display user provided pictures from a central database.
Basically when users sign up for a Gravatar account, they upload a photo and associate that photo with their email address. Once the Gravatar is set up, the next time they comment on one of your blog posts their picture will display. (Providing your WordPress theme supports avatars). The cool thing is as a gravatar user you can update or change your photo in one place (the Gravatar site) and have it update everywhere it is showing. Gravatar does have some protocols in place to ensure that adult photos don’t show up on your site.
This works really well for blogs that have multiple contributors or authors. If your authors have a Gravatar set up with the same email associated with their WordPress User profile, then you can display their photo with their blog posts.
As I mentioned above, your theme needs to support Gravatars and many popular themes do support gravatars especially in the comments section. If your theme does not support Gravatars at all or if you want to add an author photo to your blog post, the wordpress support site gives some basic instructions on how to add a Gravatar to your theme.
If you have questions about Gravatars or need help getting Gravatars set up on your blog, feel free to contact me.
