Jörg Colberg has a helpful list of design tips for photography sites. It would be nice to see more photobloggers take note of these suggestions. Most of this may be common sense, but I personally enjoy little reminders every so often.

Here's a summary of my five favorite quotes from his list:

1. "Make sure navigational elements are clear and easy to find. [...] In the worst case, people like me just close the page when they can't figure out what to do."
2. "Don't make the images you're showing too small. [...] Bigger is not always better, but smaller is almost always worse."
3. "I've seen many cases where the image compression was so bad that the photos showed very visible artefacts. Needless to say, that's quite disastrous. Would you hand bad prints to a possible client?"
4. "Huge warning signs and long text about copyright etc., right before people get to see photos, are a big turn-off for me. If you're so worried about somebody stealing low-quality images from a website [...] why do you have a website in the first place?"
5. "Don't have thumbnails point to images which are just barely larger than the actual thumbnail. That's just ridiculous."

Check out his full list. It's worth a read.

If you're looking for inspiration to create your own photo book, this could be fun:

Solo Photo Book Month

(Found via The Online Photographer.)

Also, for those of you familiar with self publishing, have any of you tried Amazon's Create Space? Looks like a serious competitor to Lulu. Which one's better?