Thumbnail and slider issues – Just Write

Hello,

Can anyone tell me how to stop a grey box with the words ‘no thumbnail’ from appearing on my index page when I post something without an image? I have some posts which I can’t get images for and would just like that space to appear blank. Happy to delve into the code but I haven’t so far as unsure what to change.

I also have an ongoing issue with the featured post slider – this drags in the featured image from the post but pulls in just a small part of the image (despite the slider images being the same size as the thumbnails which pulls them in fine). I then changed the code to make the slider the same size as the images are cropped to, but they come in at twice the size as the thumbnails, even though the code has them at the same size. Is there anyway to alter the code in the slider to fix this? Basically I want them to appear at the same size as the thumbnails on the index page, or at least a bit smaller than they are now (www.hannahstrange.org).

Any thoughts much appreciated!