How to Effectively Use Images for Better Storytelling With Avada

You invest a lot of time creating great content for your blog, so don’t lose the reader’s interest by publishing content with thoughtlessly scattered images (or even worse, none at all!).

Capture your readers’ attention and elicit an emotional reaction by treating each blog post like its own landing page. Tell a rich multimedia story with your text and images, and you’ll put your content head and shoulders over the alternatives.

Are you ready to turn your dreary blog posts into compelling visual stories? In this post, you’ll learn which tools to use to leverage powerful images on your Avada blog.

Blog posts don’t have to be plain text with images dropped in ad hoc. In fact, there’s really no excuse for that in our age of audiovisual interaction. Engaging blog posts tell a story by using a variety of text and image formats to lead the eye from one section to the next, keeping the reader engaged and curious to see what new information is just around the corner. We’re not making this up, either. Combining photos with text is proven to increase engagement.

Now let’s explore three key ways in which you can use images to add color and depth to your blog posts, and ultimately tell a more captivating story. Each of the following techniques are based on using Avada’s Fusion Builder to write your blog posts.

When it comes to adding photos, many people simply ‘Add Media’, take the default settings, and move on with their blog post.

The first step to improve your use of images is to take advantage of basic image placement variations – floating left or right, or hanging out in the center. It’s best to mix up these placements keep the reader’s eye flowing through the page. When everything looks the same, the brain tends to wander.

You have a few options to make this happen.

When you insert an image into the page, you have the option to choose how it interacts with the rest of your content.

Depending on whether you’d like the image to act as an aside to the content, or interrupt the flow of text with its own message, you can align it left or right within the text, or center it to give it special focus.

Let’s say you want your image centered with text on both sides. Is that possible? Not within the normal WordPress scope, but with Avada, of course!

The trick is to be creative with your image placement and use the Fusion Builder’s columns to take granular control of your images and ensure they display exactly how you intend them to. Here is an example of this setup:

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Below is what this looks like, set up, using the Fusion Builder:

Elements used:

Occasionally you’ll find yourself with a certain quote or standout piece of text, or some other content that really needs to set itself apart from the crowd.

You can accomplish this visually by giving it its very own background image or color, right within the post. Again, within the normal confines of WordPress this would be difficult to achieve, but using Avada’s Builder makes it easy.

So get creative. Make use of the parallax background options to animate your story even further! (WPMU DEV has a great post about how to use parallax to tell a story.)

If you feel that is taking things a little too far, it’s easy to reference our One Page Parallax Demo for subtle touches that make your page feel that much more visually interesting. Images subtly fade in, buttons bounce; the world is your oyster here.

Here are a couple of simple examples for how to use backgrounds to make your text pop.

In some cases, you may find yourself wanting to create an actual multimedia presentation within your blog post.

Instead of relying on third party services like SlideShare, you can build your own slides and presentations right within Builder. There are two choices for this:

You may be losing reader engagement on poorly designed blog posts, but with the Fusion Builder it’s easy to take the content you’ve worked so hard on and compliment it with multimedia interaction to match.

Take the extra few minutes to create immersive experiences for your readers. Fine-tune how your images are displayed, take advantage of full width parallax backgrounds, or even include native slideshows.

Do you use the Fusion Builder in your blog posts? How effective do you find these techniques to be when applied your (no longer) regular blog? Tell us how you keep readers engaged in the comments section below!