Wordpress problems

[Elk]

I have had a wordpress blog for a few weeks now. Today I tried putting photographs at either the left or right side of the bog and having the text to the side of the picture.
The problem is whenever I save it screws up the formatting of the paragraph and all the text goes together instead of staying where I put it.
I have tried reading the the forums and help pages but am feeling a bit thick and can't understand them.
How can I make my paragraphs stay where I put them?
Thanks

I'm with you in finding this all a bit of an arse - the only way I've found it works is to use 'none' as the alignment, and the text kind of goes where it looks best, but I'll keep checking this thread to see if somebody more in the know comes along and helps us out.

Is this Wordpress.com or .org? Are the pictures in your media files or stored some where else?

it is wordpress.com
I am assuming the pictures are in my media files as I upload them from my computer hard drive.

Yes, then they are in your media files.

Okay, it might be the size of the pictures, try making them smaller and see if that makes a difference.

Might also be a limitation of your theme.

If you link me to your blog I might have some suggestions!

I am very far from being an expert at Wordpress, but do you have many Plugins installed? I was trying to sort out a different problem, and where other people had come across the same issue, the advice was often to disable Plugins and see if that helps.
I keep thinking that Wordpress must be really amazing if only I could get my head around it! At the moment I am kind of skirting around the edges of it, managing to publish posts and comments, but that's about it...

Hi,
blog is
www.notanotherbead.wordpress.com

The last post is the one where i was messing about with picture placement and the paragraphs wouldn't stay in place.

It looks fine to me. What do you mean by 'wouldn't stay in place'?

If you place a picture on the right, the text will be on the left. And vice versa. If there is more text than picture, it will do what it does on your second picture and goes across the top (or bottom) before justifying to the right or left.

You can stop that by increasing the picture size, though.

When I was typing it, I would move the text (using return and space keys) to put the text to the side of the picture, so that e.g. 'Another technique...' was to the left of the picture and then 'I still had to practise... went below the picture of the pendants.

When I saved the text then reverts to what you can see. It isn't that there is anything drastically wrong it just isn't quite how I wanted it to look IYSWIM.

Ah, see it will do it automatically. You shouldn't need to add any punctuation to get it to the side of the picture and if you do add it, it 'struggles' to do what you want versus what it's programmed to do.

I'd take out all the extra spaces and returns and see how it flows by moving and resizing the picture instead. Try working with the programming, rather than against it!

Each picture has a 'place' in the text, where the cursor is when you insert or move it. Put the cursor before the text that needs to be next to the picture, then insert picture.

Does that help?

Thanks,
I will try that for the next post.