Blogger's Secret

The importance of pictures, even if you aren't a photographer

When I started blogging back in 1999, it was rare for a weblog to have much in the way of graphics, pictures, or photography included in it. Writing dominated the early blogs, and it was the steady stream of literate words that brought people back and built community.

Fast forward to 2012, and high resolution, beautiful, prolific photography is all over the Internet. It's easy to find successful photo blogs on sites like Tumblr and Pinterest, which put the minimum amount of friction between you finding a photo you like and sharing it with others.

It's important to have a distinct visual style in your weblog, and part of that in this era is generous use of photos and graphics to go alongside your writing. Here are some suggestions from my own efforts which seem to work and don't require that you yourself are an expert photographer.

First, make use of collections of Creative Commons licensed materials. I particularly like Flickr, which makes it easy to search for things where the author of the work has specifically authorized reuse.

Second, please, don't steal other people's pictures. If there's a really good photo you want to include on your blog, ask the photographer for permission for limited use to put on your site. Even if the picture is marked "All rights reserved", you may find someone who likes what you are doing enough to be willing to share it with you. It's good form to ask even if the picture is in the Creative Commons, or at least to let someone know that you liked their work enough to share it.

Third, look for collections of materials that are sharable by their nature and draw from those. I like to use book covers, which are readily available and generally usable as long as you provide the right links back to the author and publisher of the book or a bookseller that carries the book. Postage stamps worldwide are an incredible source of imagery and fun. Public domain books, findable in Google Book Search, are great for clippings that can illustrate what you are looking to say.

The last suggestion is the one I'm following for myself. The sidebar has a United States commemorative postage stamp featuring a painting of Buckminster Fuller, who is one of my inspirations for being prolific. (Look for some quotes from Bucky in future posts here). It's set up so that if I don't put an image in a given post, the postage stamp will show up as the little icon when it is shared on Facebook. Voila, a distinct visual style at a minimum of effort.

Omit needless widgets: the elements of blogging style

"Omit needless words" is the central dictum of Strunk and White's "The elements of style".  It's a good design for weblogs, where readers will make a decision about whether to skip to the next or keep going in a few seconds. 

In addition to the words in each post, a blog will have an overall design.  There is a temptation, and I speak from first hand experience having succumbed to it on other weblogs, to try out new widgets and see what they do.  I recommend doing so, but not on the blog that you keep as an expert.

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Omit needless widgets.  Your page layout should make every pixel count.   In particular, think long and hard before taking on advertising from third parties or from networks like Google - at best, those ads distract from your message, and at worst they collide with it.  Any active component on the page should tie directly to some core goal that you have and not just fill up space with something that generates a few pennies a year.

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Like the premise, the writing is weak - queue it out a week to see how it improves with a total rewrite.

After a week: yeah, still mostly true.  I need to have some more examples of nice clean professional designs where there is not much there, some counterexamples of BLING BLING BLING which are distracting, and details about how the choice of the platform you use impact what kind of choices you have to pick from.

Make your face visible

If you are going to be an expert, look the part.

The expert in their home territory, whatever that is - with the bookshelf in back of them, or holding the tools of their trade, or wearing something distinctive and iconic - should be recognizable as such. 

Prepare suitable photography, a "head shot" as it's called, and make a small version of it show up on the top of every page on your site.  On an interior "about me" page, make available print-ready versions of this photo.  You may, if you have enough variety of personal photography, offer that editor you are courting a variety of photographs to suit the occasion.

Pick carefully, because you want to be recognized when someone who you haven't met yet contacts you for a meeting to discuss a project because they've seen what you've written.

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This blog does not have that feature to it yet, so let's queue this up for publication in a week, and make sure that by then there is something like that available.  (Ah, done now, not bad.)

Survey the net to see what the conventional wisdom is for the design of the photos page.  See how someone who does great portrait photography does this (in particular look at how Myra Klarman handles this.)

When to have a plain and simple design

Pick a design template that is plain, simple and functional first.

The work you do should be visible by the force of your work product, and not by the style and shine of the art that goes around it.  Do the first dozen postings with as plain and simple a default style as you can stand, and only once you have established a writing rhythm go back and figure out which design elements and ornaments complement it. 

Generally, a blog for an expert is constructed to provide evidence of the expert's expertise and credibility.  It doesn't admit a lot that's visibly experimental in design, and it doesn't have space for distractions from its core goals.  Less is more; the content on the page is what is relevant.

That said, there is room for building something lovely, especially if the thing that you are expert in involves creating something that is lovely.  A portrait photographer needs to have great photographs and stories to match.  A musician needs to share the sounds they create.  An experimenter with the latest in new technology will have some experiments to share, not all of which will be bland.   But lovely on a small screen does not leave much room for clutter, and the imagination in the design you pick needs to focus on the imagination that you show in your work and not the experimentation of the designer or some ill-considered late night "hey what does that widget do" session that never got undone.

Plain and uncluttered designs also leave room for a clear call to action and an obvious step that you want people to take when they want to get more engaged.  The fewer alternatives that you provide to someone for how to find out more information, the better.

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As of early November 2008, the design I have here is not yet up to par; the sidebar doesn't have in it what I want it to have, and I'm not stunned by the color scheme.  But I want to get some content here first before I try to make it look better.  It's not plain (yet).

When I think of a great portrait photography blog, I think of Myra Klarman's blog Relish - the front page is simple and direct, the actual blog posts feature the photography, and there's nothing on the sidebar except contact information.  You wouldn't call it unimaginative (or the designer would smack you) but there's nothing baroque or rococo about it.

Dave's Landslide Blog is from Prof. David Petley at Durham University.  It's a completely standard off the shelf Blogger template, but you're not reading it for the design of the template, you're reading it for the detailed news of landslides around the world and the latest research.