Lecture three: Strong content is key

1. Keep it fresh
2. Content pacing
3. Tease longer material
4. Writing for narrative or thematic continuity
5. News vs. features vs. opinion
6. News format: all hail the inverted pyramid
7. Commentary: Get you rant or rave on
8. Features-style: Spinning a good yarn
9. Finding the right format
10. DJ your blog: mixing expertise and entertainment
11. Bring the context
12. Work all the angles, especially timely ones
13. Your mission, week three
14. Text-trimming tips
15. Custom header primer

Keep it fresh

Give some thought to the rhythm of your blog: both the frequency of posts and their lengths. The people making money and landing book deals work at their sites. Marie Javins, for example, spends at least an hour each day, wedged around her travels, essay-writing and day job editing comics. Those earning five-figures and up usually blog full-time. But few have that luxury in the beginning, so aim for a regular posting pace, whether that's thrice daily or once a week.

Web Marketer Stephan Spencer weighs in: "frequency is not nearly as important as recency. A couple weeks of inactivity makes the reader feel like nobody's home. Conversely, having the latest post be only a day old makes the blog appear 'fresh'."

Business and marketing writer Seth Godin points out that some genres – including a writer's blog – don't require the same freshness as a newsy blog. So consider your topic, goals and meatspace schedule, when setting your editorial calendar.

For years, conventional wisdom has pushed for daily updates. Here Eric Kintz, Hewlett-Packard's VP for Global Marketing Strategy & Excellence, denounces that habit for 10 quite solid reasons. He concludes:

If you want to be a top 50 Technorati blogger, you will most probably still need to post several times a day. But for the rest of us, we should think seriously about the added value of frequent blogging. Actually, according to Technorati, only 11% of all blogs update weekly or more. What will matter more and more is what you write and how you engage, not how often you write.

Here BlogClout's Ankesh Kothari gives four tips for determining your blog frequency. His rule of thumb about product-endorsement stands out: "only publish a blatantly promotional post after 4 good quality posts." Also notable was this advice: "60-80% of your time should go on your blog promotion. Not writing. So if you can only put in 5 hours a week, and it takes 1 hour to write a decent post, than follow a weekly publishing schedule".

Frequent updates don't merely reward a loyal audience. They boost a site's street-credit among search engines like Google and Yahoo. This, in turns, means your blog appears higher on the results page when people search, potentially garnering more clicks. Google, in particular, has a deeply secret, ever-changing 200-point algorithm that governs PageRank (more on search engine optimization later in the course).

Much like Plato's cave, bloggers watch the shadows on the wall and patch together theories about the workings of this world. Most experts agree that "recency" – a horrible jargony word – plays a key role. But so do inbound links from other sites ... encouraged by being part of a community and original content, strongly crafted.

Without a doubt, quality will take you further that empty, babbling quantity. But blogging requires a delicate balance of time and technique: geek skills, writing chops and marketing savvy. As the course progresses, we'll explore ways to attract audiences, build and participate in communities and use social media networks to spread the word. For now, we recommend students post 2-3 times each week to workshop their skills.

Content pacing

As far as post lengths go, it's generally better to write short, frequent entries than rare long ones, as this encourages repeat-readership. However, some bloggers might have a different agenda, like showcasing essays, which would merit another approach.

So what constitutes "short"? Modern Life's Stuart Brown analyzed Technorati's top 100. "The shortest average was a terse 77 words, and the longest a snooze-inducing 1,449. The vast majority of posts were over 100 words and under 500."

The bulk were 100–249 words, which would be my recommendation as well. I sometimes overspill this bandwidth, though, because, well, I'm in publisher here and I just plain want to...

The pressure to post – something, anything, even tales from the U-bend! – often inspires some short, snippety entries. And that, my friends, is a Good Thing. Because a varied palette of story lengths adds texture and rescues your blog from being a monotonous, paint-by-numbers boilerplate. Keep things lively. Mix in a 100-word reaction to a relevant news story with a 500-word essay and a photo montage. Different lengths will challenge you to think and work in different ways. And when the author's learning, and stretching and having fun, chances are the reader will too.

Tease longer material

Several solutions exist for dedicated wordsmiths who want to explore a topic in-depth. All revolve around the same idea: running pithy, catchy teaser text as your blog entry, then linking to a longer manuscript.

1. The all-blog, all-star dodge: Game your blogging platform by back-dating a longer post, as Mike does with "Tips and Tricks". This prevents lengthy or slightly off-topic content from crowding the front page. On Blogger, the time-stamp controls are under the post-entry field (fellow Mac culties: click the "post options" arrow).
   
   Pro: Couldn't be easier, allows readers to leave comments
   Con: Creates a weird dawn-of-time folder in your archives
   
   
2. The static page: Happy news – Blogger just unveiled a stand-alone-page option like WordPress's. You now can create up to ten web pages via Blogger In Draft (watch out for Mike's upcoming Tips & Tricks). Handy for those posting resumes, portfolios and contact details, this feature can also benefit writers with a handful of long pieces.
   
   Pro: Fairly simple. Draws showcase material on the blog site, possibly increasing inbound links and PageRank Googlejuice.
   Con: Ten is all she wrote.
   
   
3. External site link: connect to the piece showcased elsewhere, from an online magazine to your personal site, as Amanda did in this blog post.
   
   Pro: Can promote traffic across your sites and offer more design bells and whistles than a blog post.
   Con: Takes a bit more access or web know-how. May draw links and traffic away from the blog.

Writing for narrative or thematic continuity

The web offers instant publishing with few parameters. No editor dictates story topic, length or deadlines. That, of course, is a blessing and a curse... Where to begin, when all the world's a potential subject and all cyberspace your canvas?

As we discussed earlier in the course, bloggers need to pick a theme. That could be homeschooling or mp3 reviews or Buenos Aires restaurants ... anything that curls your toes, really. But your site needs to have a raison d'etre, a backbone of continuity, to attract a broad audience of repeat readers.

Diary-style blogs certainly deserve a place at the table. But unless you're a celebrity or a very dynamic writer, these generally attract less traffic. As the book title No One Cares What You Had For Lunch illustrates, some musings do not grip readers' imaginations.(Social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter better satisfy the minutia-reporting urge. In fact, they're often called "microblogging" platforms for that reason.).

But this isn't to say stop chronicling your life. "Write what you know" remains an authorial mantra for a reason. Just ponder how to isolate a theme from the bit-torrent of your existence. For example, Road Remedies centers around travel writing. I omit outings, social mishaps and wacky pet stories (well, most of 'em, anyway). The material's good, sure, but it remains on the cutting room floor nonetheless. My blog's a tool to give editors, readers and students a glimpse behind the scenes. It also allows me to trot out some of the anecdotes that don't make it into the mainstream media. In times of travel-drought, I will occasionally post photos or babble about my neighborhood. But I try to keep things on track. Readers come expecting insight about the trade or places I've been, not a recap of my pedicure.

Mike recently started a blog recalling his trip to Patagonia 10 years ago: an interesting technique. Mimi Smartypants may meander off topic, but she always returns to the "three-pint playdate" experience of raising her adopted Chinese daughter in Chicago. Food writer Jess Thomson spent 2007 creating, cooking and blogging a recipe a day for Hogwash. She beautifully interweaves episodes from her life into accounts of new dishes. Still, food's the common thread binding everything together.

Exceptions exist, of course. My friend Marie Javins seems to break the rules – and get away with it wonderfully. Her blog No Hurry ranges from South American chickenbus adventures to editing Muslim-superhero comics and DIY plumbing triumphs.

Home Depot and clogged U-bends? Not my thing. But Javin's a great enough blogger that I hang in there ... and soon I'm rewarded with more tales of Bolivian salt flats and Cairo during Ramadan.

When pressed, she did, in fact, point to an idea that underpinned her work. "They are thematically linked, of course," she wrote. "They're all about me expanding my horizons in a quest for life's meaning and love. The plumbing is about empowerment. The sewing serves the same function as plumbing. I theorize that women searching for similar stuff read, but also people who just like to read about scrapes and silliness read."

Her secret: Original, snappy material, frequently updated. An early adopter, Javins coded her way around the world in 2001, and has built a loyal following over time. Note the emphasis there. Unless you're Paris Hilton, people – aside from Aunt Erma and that barista with a crush – won't have an inherent interest in you. Readership will grow slowly and gradually, as search-engines funnel folks onto your site, and some are intrigued enough to return. Commenting on related blogs helps this cause, as does promotion. But we'll explore all this in more detail later. Now, let's focus on different modes, tones and paces to delight audiences.

News vs. features vs. opinion

 

Traditional journalism splits into three broad groups: the inverted pyramid format, commentary and feature-style, also called narrative writing. Northwestern University's Readership Institute discovered that the latter increased satisfaction, as well as comprehension and retention of the material, even for accounts of traffic accidents.

Its landmark Impact Study also revealed that the public craves more “go and do” information, nitty-gritty details like phone numbers, times, dates, addresses, contact names and Web sites. Women, especially, want to understand how other people live. Dry as the study's report can be, it's worth a peek to understand what motivates readers of newspapers, a group increasingly turning to blogs and website for a daily dose of content.

Business and marketing writer Seth Godin divided the blogosphere into similar slices: news blogs, writer's blogs and our blog's ("the tip of the community iceberg. A posting ... is nothing but a firestarter, a chance to start the conversation and see what happens.")

News format: all hail the inverted pyramid

News stories traditionally begin with the most important details, tapering to less critical ones towards the end. This inverted pyramid format “organizes stories not around ideas or chronologies but around facts,” explained New York University Journalism Professor Mitchell Stephens in A History of News. “It weighs and shuffles the various pieces of information, focusing with remarkable single-mindedness on their relative news value.”

Some historians link the style's birth to the expense of the telegraph. Flowery nineteenth-century language fell by the wayside, as Civil War stories clicked across the country at a penny a character. Wire services inspired brisk impartial news, bulletins useful to all papers, regardless of their political persuasion. As Columbia University's Professor James Carey observed: “It eliminated the letter-writing correspondent, who announced an event and described it in rich detail as well as analyzing its substance, and replaced him with a stringer who supplied the bare facts.”

The inverted pyramid was crucial in the days before digital design. Typesetters laid down columns of text. When the space ran out, the article ended with a decisive swipe of the exacto knife. Yet newspapers still employ the technique, especially for hard news. It survives for good reason, according to Christopher 'Chip' Scanlan, director of the National Writers Workshops. “Many readers are impatient and want stories to get to the point immediately. In fast-breaking news situations … the pyramid allows the news writer to rewrite the top of the story continually, keeping it up-to-date,” he observed on the Poynter Institute's website, where the senior faculty member is a columnist. “It's also an extremely useful tool for thinking and organizing because it forces the reporter to sum up the point of the story in a single paragraph.”

That chunk of text is traditionally called a “nut graf”: this passage showcases an article's essence and traditionally follows the lede, the introductory hook. Ken Wells, a writer and editor at The Wall Street Journal, described it as “a paragraph that says what this whole story is about and why you should read it. It's a flag to the reader, high up in the story: You can decide to proceed or not, but if you read no farther, you know what that story's about.”

To encourage traffic from search engines, try to place key nut graf details in the first 25 words, displayed when people search on a topic. The more stylish and information-dense you make that introduction, the more audience you're likely to attract.

Commentary: Get you rant or rave on

Authorial voice holds sway in this category, which includes signed columns, reviews, critiques, advice Q&A, op-ed pieces and editorials. Essays, first-person pieces and literary musings also fall under this remit: think new-media pundit Jim Jarvis, sci-fi writer John Scalzi, policy wonk Ana Marie Cox, saucy gossipmonger Perez Hilton and The Huffington Post's founder Arianna Huffington. Character and color catapult these writers to fame, as much as extraordinary topics.

Guard against grandstanding, however. Avoid pompous pronouncements a la Wizard of Oz, advised John McCormick, deputy editorial page editor of the Chicago Tribune. Target your tone to the audience. Have clear goals for the text (changing the status quo, official action, entertainment, etc.). Support well-reasoned arguments with scrupulously reported facts.

The legwork is far and away the most difficult aspect – unfortunately one that many webbers avoid. “I'm a writer, not a reporter,” they insist. Yet artistic license doesn't permit laziness. From books to blogs, every text should be anchored by accurate observations – your own and others'. Otherwise it's the sound of one hand clapping, really...

“Writers collect words,” stressed Poynter Institute Senior Scholar Roy Peter Clark, as well as “images, details, facts, quotes, dialogue, documents, scenes, expert testimony, eyewitness accounts, statistics, the brand of the beer, the color and make of the sports car, and, of course, the name of the dog.”

Like icebergs, only one-ninth of the writers' expertise shows above the waterline. The remainder molders in the notebook or files, but its strength supports the story and bestows authority. As Clark said: “A sharp focus is like a laser. It helps the writer slice material that might be tempting, but does not contribute to the central meaning of the story.”

Features-style: Spinning a good yarn

Vivid storytelling – a.k.a. as narrative writing and creative nonfiction – was once the norm. Mark Twain was a newspaperman, as well as a novelist. The “yellow papers” – led by Joseph Pulitzer's New York World and William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal – teemed with color (much of it tawdry tabloidism, but color nonetheless). The practice continued until WWII, when Ernie Pyle's compassionate columns resembled “letters home”.

Boston University Professor Mark Kramer observed in Literary Journalism: “James Agee, Ernest Hemingway, A. J. Liebling, Joseph Mitchell, Lillian Ross, and John Steinbeck tried out narrative essay forms.” He continued, “Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, Tom Wolfe, and Joan Didion followed, and somewhere in there, the genre came into its own – that is, its writers began to identify themselves as part of a movement, and the movement began to take on conventions and to attract writers.”

Authors like Hunter Thompson and John McPhee applied these techniques – and won great renown. But newspapers – on the whole – fostered a drier, more factual style. “Storytelling went out the window,” complained Jack Hart, managing editor of The Oregonian. “We had only the inverted pyramid and the standard news feature: quote, transition, quote, transition, quote, transition, kicker ... you're outta there!”

Then New Journalism blazed and helped banish “the pale beige tone of the inverted pyramid,” Hart insisted. Best of all, readers connect more with this personable style. They comprehend complex topics easier, retain information and even buy more papers, according to Northwestern University's Readership Institute.

So what is this miracle fix, exactly? Experts bicker on the finer points, but travel writing guru Don George nutshelled it well: “Essentially, a good story is like a good work of fiction, with a beginning, a middle and an end, characters and conflict, dialogue, telling details, a narrative arc. The full range of literary techniques should be employed.”

Kramer confirms this: "scene setting, dialogue, and sensory description can improve every article." Read more insights from top writers in Chip Scanlan's coverage of the the sixth annual Nieman Conference on Narrative Journalism.

Finding the right format

The Readership Institute discovered that US newspapers use inverted pyramid style for 69 percent of all stories, feature-style writing for 18 percent and commentary for 12 percent. Magazines, books and the Internet mix techniques a bit more. But a simple truth emerged from the Impact Study: publications “that run more feature-style stories are seen as more honest, fun, neighborly, intelligent, 'in the know' and more in touch with the values of readers.”

Not all topics merit the narrative treatment. A 250-word restaurant review, for example, rarely manages rising action. Some pieces are bulletins, some are stories. However, even a fact-based brief can borrow powerful tools, such as the universal theme, from features style. Likewise, a hint of inverted-pyramid prioritization or a nut graf can clarify a piece with a looser structure. The important first step, especially for a blogger, is to consciously choose a category for each post, then refine the concept.

DJ your blog: mixing expertise and entertainment

Samuel Johnson once said, “man must bring knowledge with him, if he would bring home knowledge.” So try to anchor the blog around topics that exploit your expertise or experience.

The advantages are numerous. Background knowledge frees a writer to concentrate on structure and style, rather than suffering a steep learning curve. It allows more time for other chores, like multimedia management and blog-promotion. Also, insider-reports confer instant authority, increasing the odds of repeat readers. The audience has a reason to value your perspective on the topic and return for more.

That said, blogs have a long, fine tradition of, well, spouting off for kicks and sharing quirky tidbits scoured off the net. Play with the mix, varying the texture of your blog. Perhaps follow up a whistle-blowing post with a lighter one, commenting upon some trend like laser-portrait mashups.

Monitor the zeitgeist at sites like Technorati and Alexa, which note the most search-upon and blogged-upon terms. They also note the web's hottest pages. Forget The New York Times bestseller list ... these puppies update every few minutes.

That intel's powerful. But should you jump on the bandwagon? Does it benefit your blog's goal to be one small voice shouting about a popular topic? Or would your target audience prefer a more eclectic viewpoint?

Don’t parrot or “echo chamber,” as the blogosphere calls it. Coding Horror's Jeff Atwood makes a strong point: “we have the whole of human history to talk about, and most people can't get past what happened today. If I wanted news, I'd visit one of the hundreds of news sites that do nothing but news every day. Putting yourself in the news business is a thankless, unending grind. Don't do it.”

Instead, find the stories that are uniquely yours to tell. As Roy Peter Clark wrote on Poynter's website: “All good writers express a form of curiosity, a sense that something is going on out there, something in the air." The best, he explained, “are explorers, traveling through their communities with a special alertness, connecting seemingly unrelated details into story patterns.”

On the web, original content is king. So think about what you're bringing to the table – and how that's a resource for like-minded souls. Maybe it's unearthing tales neglected by the mainstream media. Maybe it's literary nonfiction or heartfelt essays: poetically crafted in a distinctive voice. Or maybe it's snarking about cats with poor spelling or cussing out cute animals for sheer yucks.

Bring the context

Anyone, anytime should be able to dial into your blog and enjoy any given post, without reading your entire collected works in reverse order, via the archives. New meeja types rely on the "man from Mars test" to gauge this: would an alien have enough context to follow the gist?

That doesn't mean you have to endlessly repeat yourself, however. Nicknames – or epithets – can provide a framework for characters rather painlessly. Examples from Road Remedies include The Inappropriate Beau and Rainbow, dog of a lifetime. I employed another powerful tool in both those cases: internal links back to revelatory posts, for folks who want to understand more.

Not only does this richen the reader's experience, it's good for pagerank and search engine optimization. And it's tasty, low-fat and will make your $3,000 dollars a week from home. Swear.

Work all the angles, especially timely ones

As you consider topics, ask this question: why is this post by you is noteworthy now? Journalists call these characteristics an “angle”. This broad term ranges from recounting an extraordinary experience to exploring a current controversy or revisiting a historical landmark.

Any time readers can connect new information to data in "deep storage," it boosts their rate of retention. So think about how to grab their attention with fresh angles, then seal your screeds in their minds with context.

A blockbuster – or bestseller – highlights a place or subject; people fall in love with the scenery, as well as the story (remember how tourists flocked to New Zealand, as the Fellowship of the Ring trilogy unfolded?). Seek out the new ... or exhibitions and festivals for a timely twist. Writers also mark the anniversaries of events: for example, numerous journalists and bloggers retraced the route of Lewis and Clark a century after their epic trek across North America.

Remember also that you can play off news items, linking to original sources. Do you suffer from the same acoustic trauma that might be pushing whales to beach? How can readers make peanut butter at home, following the latest health scare? Are proposed four-day work weeks a blessing or a curse?

Capitalize on current headlines. Vancouver, for example, is a hot topic before the Olympic Games of 2010. Indonesia remained on the radar long after the tsunami wreckage was cleared. As architects haggled over the World Trade Center site redesign, attention focused on New York City.

Riffing off news sources is a powerful, powerful tool. But make sure you give credit where it's due. Cite the original story – its source and ideally its author – with links where possible. This respects the hard work of other writers and allows intrigued readers to follow through, exploring a topic more deeply.

Quotes add great texture to a post. If you're "data-mining" them from an article or book, be extra careful to note this (both in collegial spirit, but also as protection against libel and copyright infringement). Media law's complex, but broadly speaking, never lift more than 25 consecutive words from another's text without permission. You can, however, paraphrase and link.

Your mission, week three

Three posts – one 25 words, another 100 words, the last 350. Yes, you need to stick to the word limits (see below for advice on this front).

Please post the permalinks on the class site under Forums>Assignments>Three posts. You must submit if you want your work evaluated. Thanks!

Flushing or hiding: You can bin the posts after critiques, if you hate 'em. Or use Mike's "Tips and Tricks" dodge: backdate the entries to before the blog's launch, so they don't publish on to the front page. The time-stamp controls are under the post-entry field. On Mac, I have to click the little "post options" arrow on the left. PCs display automatically, if memory serves.

Why we do this: all writers have unconscious habits. Drills like this help jar authors out of ruts. They also force us to make every word count, rather than writing reflexively, and to self-edit (which can be painful, but also very illuminating and instructive too).

Feedback: (Amanda) writing critique

Ten text-trimming tips

When I'm drastically over the word count, I bring in re-enforcements. Often another person – fresh to the work and unsentimental – can spot the nonessential bits. Check out this piece, entitled Murder Your Darlings.

A technique I find useful is to outline the essay retroactively. I write down a short phrase that summarizes each paragraph, then one word stating its dominant emotion. First I examine the plot and emotional arc – what journey am I taking the reader on? Do I repeat myself? Backtrack? Does the piece build to a climax and finish with some insight? Sometimes I copy the summaries onto scraps of paper and shuffle them around on the desk or floor. Thinking in another dimension can help.

A few other tricks to try:

1. Make all verbs active ("the clown threw the pie," rather than ;"the pie was thrown by the clown)".
2. Trade helping verbs and gerunds (was quacking) for simple tenses (quacked).
3. Eliminate unnecessary prepositional phrases. Do we need to know that the cat curled on a blanket near the window in the living room under a sunbeam? Or just that Whiskers basked in a sunbeam? Be alert to those that repeat the obvious (in the film, on the website, in the country where you are traveling, etc).
4. Use the possessive, rather than "of" clauses. For example: "The evil editor of Knitwear Monthly suffers red-pen fever" (9 words) becomes "Knitwear Monthly's evil editor suffers red-pen fever" (7 words).
5. Replace adverbs with more precise verbs.
6. Ditto adjectives: soup up your nouns instead.
7. Ruthlessly root out word and phrase repetition. Often reading the piece aloud (or backward) helps spot terms you've echoed again and again, sometimes to no affect.
8. "Actually" and "literally" sprinkle our conversations, but rarely need airing in print. Ax 'em. Also cut adjectives that intensify, rather than modify (like just, certainly, entirely, extremely, completely and exactly).
9. Avoid sentences anchored by pronouns and verbs of being. For example, "it was Mr Portly in the foyer with a bullwhip who murdered her" (13 words) becomes "Mr Portly bullwhipped her to death in the foyer" (9 words). Readers respond better to characters in action, anyway.
10. Trim restatements (a sultry, sexy fandango).

Custom header primer

To round out week three, we'll take just a brief detour from authorial nerding to tech geekiness: how to make a snazzy header. This not only gives a strong first impression, it brands your blog, distinguishing it from the herd.

Here are three Blogger methods, each increasingly complex (WordPressers might want to check out this intro, as well as this article). All our samples employ art created by Amanda. You can source images from the web also, but make sure you have permission to reprint or repurpose them. We'll explore licensing in-depth later, but here's a quick Flickr primer about the Creative Commons. Sites like Header Spot offer royalty-free images, as well as custom graphics as low as $30.

As the header suggests, this post is a primer. We'll explore more intricate solutions and hacks for folks with custom domains next week.

Control color and font
Start on the Layout Page. Click "Fonts and Colors" on the beige nav bar. The lefthand panel contains options for Blog Title Color, Blog Description Color, then – lower down – Blog Title Font and Blog Description Font. Righthand click-boxes control bold and italics. Links adjust the size of text.

The preview box displays changes. In a few clicks, I managed to make the class blog's header quite hideous. Luckily Blogger includes a "clear edit" button, right beside the "save" one...

Upload a background image
In Layout, go to Page Elements. Click the "edit" button on the header box. In the Configure Header pop-up window, select Placement "behind title and description".

Here's the original image that I'm folding, mutilating and stapling:

Click "shrink to fit," otherwise you could wind up with a massive header like thus:

This pushes your fresh content down the page, forcing reader to scroll to engage with new material. Not ideal. So let's try "shrink to fit".

From bad to worse, eh? So, you'll need to size the image – and perhaps also crop – it in a photo editing program. Blogger will give you the width in freaky small text at the bottom of the Configure Header box.

1. First adjust the width of the photo. That's 660 in the case of my Minima-template test blog.
2. Then crop its height. Around 150-170 pixels makes for a nice, shallow header. It adds color and character, but doesn't upstage the blog's content: the reason people are there.
3. Layout>Page Elements> Edit Header>Configure Header. Click "shrink to fit".

**

Upload a custom header

For maximum control of the look and feel, design your entire header – blending the text and image – in a photo-editing program.

1. Open a new file sized to fit your template. On Amanda's test blog, that's 660 x 155.
2. Go to Layout>Page Elements> Edit Header>Configure Header. This time, be a devil and click Placement>Instead of title and description.
3. I stuck with "shrink to fit" and it overhung the border a little. Most annoying. So I went into Layout>Fonts and Colors, then changed the Border Color to match the white background.

We can't cover all the intricacies of photo editing software in this class: there simply isn't time enough. But a few elements to play with, if you know (or are learning) a program:

1. Novelty fonts
2. Alignment (left, right or centered)
3. Collages
4. Drop shadows (Photoshop tutorial here)
5. Intensity of the image. Here I dropped the background opacity to 90%, so the darker parts of the photo didn't overwhelm the schmancy Papyrus font (which wouldn't bold).