I used to have cover images for some posts on my blog. I felt they added some needed pizzazz to the site. Turns out I was wrong. It added a splash of color to the index page, sure, but it also brought some issues.
First was that some images were too big, spacing out blog posts on the index page, forcing users to scroll way too much to go through the posts list. I tried to remedy this by cropping the images and making them all the same height. This, I found, works for some images, but ruins others. No bueno.
Second issue was that it created an obstacle to writing. By adding the need to have a cover image meant I needed to hunt for one for each post I made. Fuck that. So I decided I’d add a cover image only for non-personal blog posts. This looked awful. Some posts had an image, some did not. This broke the uniformity of the index page.
What’s the point of cover images anyway? Well, there are reasons to have them I suppose. They provide a visual hint about what the content is about. Also, when you share a link, the cover image is usually used as the thumbnail, making for pretty links. And nice thumbnails may pull in more views. Also, having cover images may do something for positive for SEO. Do I think any of these weigh up to the headache of finding appropriate images for each post and editing them to fit the constraints I set? No. Not at all.
And gone are the cover images.
