Your WordPress Site

A Gravatar is an avatar you can set up at Gravatar.com. You associate a square avatar with your e-mail address, and then whenever you create a post at a website that supports Gravatars, your own avatar will automatically show up. Wordpress is one of the main sites that support Gravatars, although I’ve seen them crop up elsewhere.

If you have a Wordpress based site, you have the option of turning Gravatars on or off, and they are currently turned off at Indie Ave because I didn’t like the way they showed up in my pages. I might give it another try later.

But at the moment, I think the answer is yes, you should get your own Gravatar so your avatar will show up if you post to a Gravatar enabled site.

The design your use for your avatar is fairly important because it will help to establish your band’s “brand”. Ideally, your avatar will be based on your band’s logo – something you want to become automatically associated with your band. And it would be great if your avatar really stands out when it is displayed, even in a tiny 16×16 or 32×32 picture such as you might find on Twitter. (Twitter does not use Gravatar, but it would be an excellent idea to use the same design for both!) Done right, your avatar can even serve as your favicon.ico for your web site (more on that later in another article, but you can Google favicon.ico to learn more now if you want.)

For example, here are Ivory Drive’s and Indie Ave’s avatars: 

The Ivory Drive avatar really stands out when it is displayed in a group of other avatars. It is being used as Ivory Drive’s Gravatar, its favicon.ico, and many other places. This avatar is not the only square picture Ivory Drive uses, however. It is better to use a real photograph on most of the websites that host band pages. However, whenever appropriate, it is a good idea to use a single gravatar (or close variation) whenever possible to maximize your brand image.

It is fairly easy to define your avatar at Gravatar.com. The idea is to associate an e-mail address with an avatar. Then, whenever you post to a site that supports Gravatars, the site will use your e-mail to fetch the corresponding Gravatar. This means you either need to be consistent on the e-mail address you use when you post, or add all the e-mail addresses you use to post to your Gravatar.com account. Just go to Gravatar.com to set up your account.

Note – this is not the most critical topic I hope to discuss here at Indie Ave, but I just spent some time setting up Indie Ave’s and Ivory Drive’s Gravatars, so now is the time to write about it!