How to Add an Avatar to Your WordPress.org Blog and Your Comments Around the Web

You search in the Your Profile section for an option to add your avatar. Useless! Instead, you must navigate to the Users > users section of the WP dashboard. There you will see the specter of yourself - the little gray head & shoulder icon - as well as that of any other persons authorized to write on your blog.  It only adds insult to injury if the other writers on your blog ARE represented by their own avatar!

Unfortunately, there is no click here to change the avatar! This stumped me for awhile and it could stump you, too. Fortunately, it is easy to fix!

The secret of a WordPress avatar is – Gravatar! (hint for experienced avatarists - just go to Gravatar).

A gravatar is simply a globally recogized avatar! One of those clever plays on words by Automattic, the same company that provides WordPress AND Gravatar,

"Your Gravatar is an image that follows you from site to site appearing beside your name when you do things like comment or post on a blog. Avatars help identify your posts on blogs and web forums. . . "

A gravatar is simply connected to an email that you designate and will appear elsewhere on the web when you use that same email address. Presto!

For detailed and illustrated instructions, head over to the Gravatar website, en.gravatar.com and follow along with the red notes on the images below!

Helpful hint! Having a Wordpress.COM account is useful for those with a WordPress.ORG account.

You can see by the annotated images included here how simple it is to use the Gravatar site to turn your avatar into a potentially famous and well-known Gravatar. The more you comment on the web and participate in forums, the more you need an avatar working on your behalf.

You may well find it useful to have more than one Gravatar online if you have several websites or a reason to separate your personas.

Avatars, Gravatars, Profile Pictures and the like give you an identity online. When people can associate an image with your words, you are more dimensional to others and they can determine more easily whether they will like and trust you online. They may see your Gravatar next to a comment on a blog they are reading and say to themselves, "Oh, there's so-and-so! If he/she likes this blogger, it must be good!" Or they may say, "Oh, that jerk here-and-there is making noise again! I'm just going to ignore him/her."

It's sort of like wearing a uniform around - people will recognize you by what you've put on. They will start calculating the infamous online formula: is this someone I know? that I like? that I can trust?

(I think Chris Garrett is credited with saying that first.)

If you aren't seeing Gravatars show up in your comments, do a quick check to see if you have the turned on! I have my friend Tom from Northwest Scenescapes Photography to thank for this reminder!

In your WordPress dashboard, go to Settings > Discussion and scroll down until you get to the Avatar section. Is the little radio button for Show Avatars checked?

Yes? Then you should be good to go! Write something to make the world a better place now, ok?

No pressure there, is there?

Deb is a blogger, photographer and also a ProSeller designer on Zazzle.com. She enjoys moving around the country, taking pictures and writing essays, talking to strangers and is addicted to Diet Coke.

You can check out her blog, WoodswalkerTalk, that was used for most of the examples in this article

Check out her stores for your Beach, Nature, Family and other creative cravings!

I find talking about myself in the third person is a bit strange. And to think, I had never regarded that lesson in English as very important, but it was!