Gravatars

Video Transcript

This class is going to cover globally-recognized avatars, also known as Gravatars.

What is an avatar? Well, an avatar is a graphical representation of a user of you. It is very similar to what a logo is to a business or a business website because that is a graphical representation of that business or that website. Now, from a company or business branding standpoint, creating an avatar as early on in your business as possible is a great idea.

Now a great place to do this gravatar.com. Now, gravatar.com is owned by the same folks that own WordPress, Jetpack, and WooCommerce. That’s automatic. I mention that because for you to sign in or sign up for a Gravatar account, which, by the way, is completely free, you have to do so with your WordPress.com account. Now, if you don’t have one, not to worry. The registration process for a Gravatar account will automatically give you that wordpress.com account, and it’s all free.

Now, then if I click on Sign In here, I’m already logged in, so it’s going to bring me to my Manage Gravatars page. Let’s open this up in a different browser and click on Sign In, and you’ll be brought to this page here where you can either enter your wordpress.com log-in credentials like your user name or your email address, click on Continue, enter your password, that kind of stuff, or you can create a new account, or do what I did and use one of your Gmail accounts and continue with Google.

The process is similar. You enter your email address that you want to be used as the primary email address on that particular Gravatar account, and by the way, you can have as many Gravatar accounts as you want and as many different email addresses within those Gravatar accounts.

For example, I’ve got one Gravatar account, my main one, and it has 23 different email addresses. All of them have the same image. Again, it’s that branding thing. It’s very straight forward stuff. You enter your email address, click Next. They send you a confirmation email. You click on that link. Boom, you’re into gravatar.com.

Now, whenever you get into gravatar.com, let’s go ahead and close these guys out here, all you have in there at that point is your email address. You’ll have some kind of a notice that pops up saying that you have to associate an image with that email address, and it’s very similar process that I’m going to be showing you right now.

Let’s go ahead and add an additional email address and an additional image because the process is all the same. Let’s go ahead and do this. I’m going to add another Gmail account. It doesn’t have to be Gmail. It’s just for this demonstration that I got a bunch of Gmail accounts. Click on Add, and there you go. You see they sent me a confirmation link. I open up that email account, basically providing it that it is my email account. Click on that link. Let’s go ahead and do that now.
Here’s the email. Here’s the link. Going to click on that.

Here’s that account right here. Now, I don’t have a big pop-up here warning me that I don’t have any images associated with that email address because I already have a primary email address on that account, but here’s the email address that we just hooked up to my Gravatar account. We go ahead and select that. Now with it selected, I can select any of the images that I have down here to associate to that email address.

Well, Jimmy wouldn’t want Clark’s images associated with his email address, so let’s add a different image. You got all these different ways to get them. Pretty straight forward stuff. I’m going to upload one from my computer. Choose file. There’s Jimmy’s image. Then next. Crop it where you want it. Click on Crop Image. Choose the rating. I think Jimmy’s good for G. Set rating.

Now, and of email addresses that we have on this Gravatar account, where would you like to use this image? Right there. You select an image, and there we go. Now, like I said on one of my other Gravatar accounts, I’ve got 20-some odd different email addresses. All of them have the same image. Again, it’s for the branding thing. That’s totally up to you how you do that.
Now, as far as where are these Gravatar images going to be displayed? Well, they’re going to be displayed wherever your profile image is shown that is associated with a particular email address of yours. In this case, this email address is on this site logged in, so in this case, it’s going to be associated with the admin toolbar up here and on this site anywhere that the Gravatar image is displayed like posting in comments or forum posts or on any other website that uses the Gravatar image as an identifier.

Now, if a site uses the Gravatar images as an identifier, and you do not have a Gravatar account, then the image that is associated with your email address, if you’re posting a comment on that site, it’s going to be the Gravatar logo, so don’t be just a Gravatar logo. Pick an image and associate it with your email address or addresses. For example, if we go into our comments here, this is the Gravatar image that’s associated with this email address.

Well, that’s it. That’s the end of this video on what is a Gravatar, and how to get one set up. Thanks for checking it out, and you have a great day.