The first 10 Tips for Designing Photoblogs talked about how best to design a photoblog. However, it didn’t properly cover how to design and organize the actual images. That’s what we’re going to do now.

8 More Tips for Your Pictures

• Organize your photos. If your images have variety between them, it’s worth taking the time to categorize them clearly. For example, by type (Color or greyscale?) or by subject (People, Places etc). Tags would allow you to use a whole range of classifications.

Opera have kicked up a storm by launching an attack on Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. The case focuses on the anti-competitiveness of Microsoft bundling IE with Windows and their poor standards support.

It’s very easy for a web developer to take up arms against Microsoft (Goodness knows we do that often enough!), but in this case Opera is wrong.

I’m Free To Choose Whatever Browser I want

From Ars Technica’s Opera/IE write-up, we have this quote from the Opera CEO:

"We are filing this complaint on behalf of all consumers who are tired of having a monopolist make choices for them."

In the first post, What Is Design Clutter?, we talked about how clutter is caused by too many objects competing for attention.

The problem for any blogger is choosing which objects should get attention and which shouldn’t. It’s hard to accept that something you went to the trouble of putting on your page isn’t worth actively promoting (Because it will steal attention from the things that really do matter).

Separating The Wheat from The Chaff

The best way to avoid clutter and make sure that the valuable parts of your blog are properly promoted is to make a clear list of your priorities. Once it’s written down, it will make design decisions much easier.

Write out a list of every element on your blog (From the blog title right down to the post date!), and then run each aspect through this flowchart:

Photoblogs have the very best looking content, no doubt about it. Why then can it be so hard to design a photoblog well? Surely the photos alone look good enough?

These 10 tips discuss the theme and design for the blog/gallery, and I’ll be following it up later with a post on how to organize and display the images well.

My 10 Tips for Styling Your Blog

• Use neutral colors. When photographing people, you never know what they will wear so you use a neutral background. The same applies to your design. You need a background color that works with all your photos (e.g. The black background here is perfect against the Northern Light photos of all colors.)

Choosing the parts of your site that a user sees is all about prominence. The more prominent something is, the more often it will be seen.

The problem with prominence is that it’s relative.

Simply giving something a bright background and a bigger font does not make it prominent. It must stand out in comparison with the rest of the design.

For example, the "Come On In. We’re Hiring" badge on Authentic Boredom may be very noticeable, but if you put it on this site, it would just blend in. They need a different method of getting attention.

What Sarah Said is a personal blog, belonging to Sarah of course. It was picked out of a CSS gallery to be this week’s review candidate; a high quality candidate!

What Has Been Done Well?

• Color. No-one will argue that the color scheme here isn’t unique. The unusual combination looks great, and works perfectly. Getting this right has instantly made WSS memorable.

Downtime is one of those things that we all fear. Some of us have more reason to fear it than others though. A shabby downtime page can lose you valuable traffic.

A few hours ago I decided to check in on a promising new blog I discovered recently. I wanted to see how it was doing and the new content.

That is, until I read the homepage:

"We’ll be back very soon. Please hang in there."

That was the entire contents of the page.