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.

'Create Yout Own Photoblog' is a new book by Catherine Jamieson about creating and running your own photoblog.

Here's what Catherine has to say:

"'Create Your Own Photo Blog' published by Wiley and released by
Amazon on March 27. It will be in all major bookstores on April 10.
People will be able to thumb through a book at Chapters and Barnes and
Noble, for instance, and see our work - which is pretty cool. Barnes
and Noble have agreed to a premium in-store placement and it will be
contained in their monthly newsletter."

The book features many of our members and is available now!

Weblog Usability: The 10 Top Ten Design Mistakes: here's a great article that is written with text based blogs in mind but is just as applicable to photoblogs. It's worth reading and then examining your photoblog structure and templates. I think we sometimes forget that there are many people out there who have yet to visit a photoblog. If yours is the first one they hit will it be a good experience or will they be turned off by not knowing accepted photoblog structures?

While you're visiting check out the following other useful articles:

 
• Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 2005
• Usability 101: Introduction to Usability
• Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design

From the same people that brought you SimpleViewer comes PostcardViewer, a free Flash image viewer.  Kind of like SimpleViewer, except about 1000% more awesome, if that's even possible, which it might not be because SimpleViewer is so cool.

I've been attempting a full CSS layout for my photoblog and have a big, big problem. I sometimes post multiple images and display them next to each other horizontally (like Tracey, except in a much smaller scale). When trying to rebuild I discovered that while <table width=" ... nowrap> will force all your images to sit next to each other, hence creating a horizontal scrollbar, CSS doesn't quite do that. My images are now traditionally on top of each other when there are multiple images.

In Internet Explorer, putting align="left" in your <img> tag will solve the problem, but it still looks horrible in standards-compliant browsers like Firefox. A technically expert friend and I are puzzled over this.

Maybe if we can't solve it I'll abandon this cause and use tables again. In the meantime, does anyone have some remedies? If you'd like to view the layout and CSS just drop an email: jazzzmin at gmail.com

After reading Newsfeeds: Worthwhile? on this blog - absorbing, initially being skeptical and finally being converted to the idea of RSS feeds ~ I decided to make one for my photoblog, not having a photoblog engine that generated a feed automatically.
After a few false starts I eventually got it together, so I thought I should share my learning experience on the Wiki for those who may be similarly inclined.  So here is the link:

Roll Your Own RSS Feed

Cheers!
Cameron

Who do you host with? I've got 4 domains, 3 sites, and am looking to change hosts. I'd be interested to know:

• who you host with?
• how's their uptime?
• do the give good service?
• what do they cost?
• how much space/traffic do they offer?
• do they have a good statistics report?
• are they MovableType friendly?

Alternatively a "I'm with Xweb and they're great!" and a link to their site yould be sufficient.

It'd also be interesting to hear about any negative experiences you've had with hosts. Thanks!

I've been getting several emails from people who want to start their own photoblog, but they really don't know much about blogging or the web.

So I've created a page in the wiki called Starting Your Own Photoblog. It would be great if we could work together to create this page for the uninitiated.

Welcoming and helping new photobloggers is a good thing.

Don't you just hate "comments (0)"? Aside from creating multiple personalities to post for you, there is another way.

If you're using Movable Type 2.21 or above, there's an easy plugin you can install that will turn "comments (0)" into "comments" -- regular comment counting begins with the first post ("comments (1)", etc.).

The full poop is here.

I don't know how often you think about this -- and I don't know if software like Movable Type allows you this flexibility -- but there is a bit of html code called the 'title tag' which provides the text you see at the top of the monitor when you visit a web page. Google is very sensitive to that element when it creates page rankings.

I recently updated all my photo pages so that the title code reflected the photo content ("apartment buzzers," for instance -- and oddly I'm number one now on a search for 'apartment buzzers'). It took a little time to do it on over a hundred pages (yes, I passed my hundredth some time ago, don't worry, there was no party) and I am already seeing benefits in terms of traffic.

Is the traffic improvement more than what I'd see if I were in the top 100 here at photoblogs.org? Probably not. But if you want to be seen, this doesn't hurt.

In setting priorities, I'd focus more on photos people are likely to be looking for, such as landmarks, instead of stray objects like apartment buzzers. BUt if you choose to go all out and tag every page, being systematic is easier.