An exercise in using Blogger to create an art portfolio site

If you’re looking to create an art or photography portfolio using Blogger, or other free blog software, you’ve come to the right place!
This is the first post about what I did.
You’ll also find these useful:

I’ve been researching this for a while, and I’m glad to share what I’ve learned/collected with you. If this is useful to you, I’d adore some link-love back to dabbled.org!

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One of my goals for my sabbatical was to create a new art portfolio site. A photographer friend and I were discussing how it’s such a pain to keep portfolio sites updated, and I was thinking it would be really cool to see whether I could create one using Blogger, that would look like an art site, not a blog–but be as easy to update as a blog. I figured this had to have already been done, but I wasn’t having much luck with my google-fu finding anything like what I was looking for. There seems to be no standard art or photography portfolio template out there. So I decided to do it myself. (Note that I have very limited development skills, having never really messed around with xml or css or any kind of blog template, other than tweaking the dabbled one) It’s not finished yet, (I still can’t figure out how to make the right column start at the top of the page, not under the header), but I think it’s pretty decent for an artist or photographer portfolio site totally done in Blogger.

Since it took me 3 days of trial and error (and one episode of messing up the dabbled.org template by accident) I would love some feedback on the layout/usability etc. Not really looking for feedback on the art (unless you want to tell me which ones should stay and which should go), more on the website itself. Like should each picture be in an individual post rather than scrolling down to see a collection? Is it annoying to link things back to flickr? Does the flash on the main page work/look good? Are the categories good?

And if anyone would like information or instructions on how to do this, I can write something up..
edit: here’s some of the instructions. I’m sure i’ve forgotten alot, so ask questions..

dorsner.blogspot.com

Mar09 Edit: You may also want to check out my new version of a portfolio site using Tumblr instead of Blogger.