I swear I just read this post for the first time. Figures, I think I come up with a good idea, and you are already well down a similar road. Like an Italian inventing pasta, I guess.

I think my typical reader is a little further along than yours (and, sadly, likely more scarce as result.) But I think the idea of serving up assignments – complete with the occasional curve ball – to a group of motivated amateurs will yield interesting results.

Using Flickr as a repository, it is easy to group reader-sent photos in any way you want, so I plan to exploit that.

I’also launched a similar enterprise: the blog describing step by step promotion process of a newly opened web site on the case of Business Directory 4Clever. The blog will cover in chronological order all the actions taken to drive visitors to site: taken promotion efforts, search engine activity and behavior, visitor attitude and so forth.

Hope, it will be intresting for Problogger visitors too.

On the other hand I do not like the template you have used at all. I like the colours, they match the image that I have of photography sites, but the navigation is just impossible. I know you are interested in visitors entering specific pages via search engines, but I think that it wouldn’t hurt to make it easier for visitors coming through the homepage to navigate to deeper levels.

I always use a very special usability test, I ask my 65 year old father to navigate through a site, this always helps me find any weak spots in the navigational structure ;)

Well, as I just found out there is a referral program for Picasa run by Google. You’ll get 1$ for each referred download of this program. That may be great on fotologs!

The layout of his site is a freely downloadable template. (He mentions a thank you to the designer on his ABOUT page.)

Actually that was going to be my question to Darren:

Are you planning on implementing a modified version of the template you are using? Or are you just using that template while you are ramping – and planning on a custom layout down the road? Or are you experimenting with the “faux-frames” CSS layout to see how it might work for a custom template down the road utilizing the same features?

For what it’s worth, there are some decent plusses with that template you are using. I like the idea of the navigation and other elements remaining in place on the page. My only concern is that the layout may be just awkward enough to confuse some users.

But I’m sure you are testing that out right now anyways…

Thanks for the blog launching insights!

DM

Is it just me or is your photography site layout look lots like http://howto.diveintomark.org/

Anywho. I find it a little hard to navigate…..

Personally I don’t think I know much about photography in and of itself so I am looking forward to learning more on what Darren shares with us. Already have learned a little.
Steve