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.

Business Blog Wire is a blog run by Easton Ellsworth. The blog is focused particularly on businesses blogging, but also for any money-making bloggers out there.

So, what can be said about its design? It’s a plain design, but it works. There is a lot of content, and a lot of links to other sites in its blog network.

What Has Been Done Well?

• Post headings. Have a look at the headings and you’ll see why I think they’re great. Scanning down the home page for post titles is not a problem here.

Many of us include the time in our comments.

The comments should serve as a conversational area, and it makes sense that you would be interested in when the last reply was written, or how long it has been since you left your reply.

However, time is relative to where you are in the world. While it is nearly 10pm here in the UK, it is past 3 in the morning in India. On the internet, hearing the time is meaningless if you don’t also know the time-zone it is in.

And that begs the question; why do we bother to include the time in the comments at all?

A few weeks ago I ran an offer where I would give 5 free tips on anyone’s blog’s design. The offer went down very well, and I’d like to share some of what I have learnt so far.

Every design is unique of course, however, there are some small flaws that I found to be common across quite a number of blogs.

The 5 Pointers

1. Take care with your logo. A fast-loading blog is important, but not everything is worth forsaking for its sake. In particular, a lot of bloggers have compressed their banner images to a point where pixelation around the letters is noticeable. Your logo is too important for this.