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.

The Daily Rambler is a blogging blog. If you’re looking for a new place to get your daily dosage of blogging tips, then you might want to check it out.

What Has Been Done Well?

• The header. The image in particular is striking, and easily the most memorable aspect of the design. The clean black of the rest of the header fits perfectly with the sleek car.

Depending on your blog’s topic, post images can encourage reading. But where do we place those images? On the left or the right?

A common response to this is to place the content on the left, because Westerners read from left to right. That is true, and it does play a role in the decision, but not always in the way you would expect.

The Left Logic

Images work because they draw attention. The visual interest draw the user’s eye towards the picture, and hence the post. However, once the eye has been drawn, where does it go from there?

This is the 3rd article in our attempt to answer the question of What Makes a Good Design?. We’ve already covered site goals and user goals, but those only take effect when the use is actually on your site. What about when they’re elsewhere? Or even offline?

A purpose-built, usable blog is great, but if it isn’t strikingly designed, it will be forgotten! If a visitor reads your iPod article today, what is it that will make them think of you the next time they’re looking for iPod info?

Be different. Be unique. Be memorable. And here’s how:

It is one thing to choose excerpts over full posts on the homepage. You can even choose how you want to generate these excerpts easily enough. Yet with that done, you still have another decision to make every time you write a post; what length should a post excerpt be?

Getting the Job Done

In short, a post excerpt should be as long as it needs to be to get the job done. The job of an excerpt is to give your readers a teaser, a sample of what is to come. It is important to realize that your excerpt is not your article. If you wanted the reader to hear all that you have to say on the home page, you would be using full posts, not excerpts.

I begin almost every post here at Pro Blog Design with an image. The images are usually interesting, and do take a while to pick out. Do they encourage people to read more posts?

The answer is that for a certain type of blog, they do. For another type, they don’t.

When Post Images Are Worth Adding

• In plain templates. Many blogs are designed to be minimalist and plain, allowing the content to be focused upon. A well selected image in the post can work wonders for adding personality to the design, without losing the clean simplicity.