marinegirl | geek

Photoblogs typically have a minimalist, clean design to focus the readers eye on your images, but it’s up to you how you want your photoblog to look. I’m not going to go through step by step everything I’ve done with Nautilus, but here are some points to consider:First, you might want to remove the sidebar on your main page. Make a copy of ‘index.php’, and rename it ‘home.php’. Remove the call to get the sidebar. This will stop the sidebar showing, but will leave a big gap where it should be. To solve this problem, change the ‘primary’ div to something else, e.g. ‘primaryhome’, and in your CSS file set the width of your new div to the combined with of primary+sidebar. Upload this file into your wordpress directory, ‘home.php’ always takes priority over ‘index.php’ for the front page, so you don’t need to do anything in wordpress to tell it about your new template. Clever huh?ColourTypically, photoblogs have a simple, often black and white colour scheme. Opinion seems to be divided between light themes with dark text or vice versa.Navigation……is usually understated. I reduced the header height to give just enough room for a title and horizontal menu, no background image. Some people prefer to have no navigation at the top of the page, and place the menu underneath the photo / post. Whether you decide to use K2’s rolling archives or not, most photoblogs have some kind of ‘previous’ and ‘next’ links to allow viewers to easily scroll back through your photographs.SizeI set the width of Nautilus to 740px. At this size, most screens will display a full landscape photograph without the viewer needing to scroll; there’s no point making your photos so big that they can’t be seen properly!Title and metadataI decided to move the photo title, and date to underneath the main image. You can do this either by moving the entry-meta code in ‘theloop.php’ or by altering the positioning in your CSS file.Ta dah! All done. You can finish the cake now.