When we did our website redesign in December we took the opportunity to update our blog too (spring clean ‘n all). With our spanking new blog came the decision to allow the use of Gravatars. We love them because it’s nice to put a face to the comments and see who’s participating on our website. As a Gravatar user, we like being able to identify ourselves online in a nice, graphical way rather than just text.

But what is a Gravatar I hear you cry!

First off, a Gravatar refers to ‘Globally Recognised Avatar‘.

An avatar is a small graphic that you choose to represent you (in our case our pictures). A Gravatar is a small image referenced from your Gravatar account that effectively attaches itself to you (via your email address) and shows up on sites that have allowed these to be displayed.

To get our Gravatar we signed up to en.gravatar.com which requires just an email address (so it’s ultra-fast to set up). Once signed up we could upload our pictures from either the computer hard drive, reference one on the Internet or snap a new one on a webcam. Immediately we could see our smiley wee faces on our own and other people’s blogs that we had commented on.

If you want to see an exmaple of our Gravatars in action take a peek at the comments on this post or look at the image below!

Related posts:

1. Protecting your online reputation
2. PoLR’s New Site
3. Blogging – What non bloggers make of it

Web Design gravatars