Another of the four ways of identifying the author of the post and linking it with rel=”author” to the author page is using AuthorSure’s “post author box”.
The Author Box appears at the foot of the post content but before the comment section. The author box contains an avatar photo of the author and his or her bio. The title of the author box contains a link to the author page with rel=”author”.
An Example of An Author Box
Here is an example of how it appears visually.
The placement of the author profile before the comments section is likely to increase the likelihood of the reader making a comment.
When To Use Author Box
This author linking method is appropriate when:
- you have more than one author on your site;
- you have a number of guest authors and the author box gives the guest a greater incentive to contribute to your site;
- your WordPress theme does not provide rel=”author” links in the post byline;
- you do not mind getting your hands a little dirty styling the CSS for the author box to make it fit in with your WordPress theme
How To Change the Appearance of the AuthorBox
There are few ways to influence the author box: two within the AuthorSure plugin and the third by adding your own CSS to your WordPress theme’s stylesheet, style.css .
Author Title Prefix
In the AuthorSure Options page you can choose your own version of the text that precedes the author name in the author box – the “About”. For example, you might want to use “More About” or leave it blank or of course something completely different if your site is not in English.
Avatar Size
In the AuthorSure Options page you can choose the size of the square photo you want to display in the author box: this will typically be in the range of 50 to 100 pixels.
To make the avatar photo available to WordPress you must load it in advance at gravatar.com. This will cause your photo to appear on all the comments you make on your own blogs and on other people’s blog. This is useful in building your brand and promoting your presence in your niche.
Customize the Author Box Appearance
The plugin specifies the CSS class “authorsure-author-box” which you can add as element to your theme’s stylesheet. This allows you to make sure that the authorbox style elements are controlled by your theme.
The default author box has a ‘whitesmoke’ background with a thin black border, and the avatar photo is floated to the left with the author title and bio on the right.
However, you can override the default settings using your own CSS.
For example if your theme always has images on the right and titles in upper case, no background colors, and links underlined and in blue, then you would add the following lines to your style.css.
[css]
#content .authorsure-author-box { background: none; }
#content.authorsure-author-box img {float:right; margin-left: 10px; }
#content.authorsure-author-box h4 { font-weight: normal; }
#content.authorsure-author-box h4 a { text-decoration: underline; color: blue }
[/css]
Note that that should add these lines to the theme’s style.css file and not any plugin CSS file. This will preserve the contents when the plugin is updated.
About Russell
Technologist, software engineer, internet marketer and WordPress plugin developer with experience in Finance, Telecoms and the Media.