Here are some best practices for authors uploading articles.
Make the headlines interesting and relevant
Upload the body of your article
Try to keep paragraphs bite-sized for ease of visual scanning.
About 100-150 words into the article, click the MORE tag, which you can find at the top of the upload window along with other tools.
Select ONE category
Putting an article in two, five or all categories will not help you with exposure. It makes for extra work for editors and we may end up putting your article in a category you don’t like.
Add six to eight Tags
Tags help further sub-categorize articles. They’re basically key words. Each should be one or two words which accurately describe your article. Don’t add tags you think are hot but are not relevant to the story. That doesn’t help, but it can hurt overall search and page rankings.
Add your photo
Lead photos need to be added by clicking on the bottom of the right sidebar where it says “Set Featured Image”. Upload your image, then follow the prompts to make sure it uploads and works. You can preview it later.
Photos should be wide, not tall. Tall photos will look strange on the site. Even if the sides are boring, that’s fine, we can crop it for the print edition.
They should also be fairly big. Think about a minimum width of 1,000 pixels. We can scale them down as needed, but we can’t scale them up. Especially if they’re used in our print edition, high quality is very important.
You’re encouraged to upload full resolution photos. You can sharpen them up in Photoshop or similar programs, crop them, adjust color levels, contrast, etc, but please submit them on the bigger side whenever possible.
Want to add even more photos?
Put your cursor where you want the photo to appear and click on the “Add Media” button on the toolbar above the body text upload area and follow the prompts. You can still upload a full-size image, but you may want to select a smaller size from the options listed to make it fit and look better.
CLICK TO PREVIEW YOUR STORY!
Before you click to save and exit out, click on the PREVIEW button to see how your story will look. This is important because you can catch many problems on your end. We can fix them, but it slows down the time to publication, reduces the time we have to get stories out, and it will also help you to ensure your article appears exactly as you envision.
Please note…
We reserve the right to edit, shorten, expand or otherwise alter your submission to fit available space, add pertinent information, remove extraneous or superfluous content, revise spelling and grammar, and otherwise edit for any reason necessary. This includes the adjustment of body content, headline, tags, category or photos.
We’re here to help make it easy…
If you have questions or need any help, don’t hesitate to get in touch using our contact page and we’ll get back to you as soon as we’re able, usually within two business days.
