I’ve been repeatedly emphasizing the importance of a professional looking theme for your blog in some of my recent posts and I really mean it.

When I see amateur themes on blogspot hosted blogs, it’s very disturbing because they all have great content, but due to their not-so good theme, they fail to attract visitors. ANd very often, they have all the plugins and widgets loaded to the side bars which just stick out and spoil the whole show.

Even if you can’t afford a custom webdesign, using a good looking, no frills, no nonsense theme can do the trick!

And, more than just attracting people, templates can do a lot more to your blog.

• It shows how authoritative your blog is.
  With a professional looking, standards based, valid markup theme, any visitor gets an impression in the first look itself, that the blog carries some authority.
• It shows how dependable you are.
  A not so good looking blog cannot convince the reader of it’s information authenticity while a good looking blog can.
• It shows how organized you are.
  In real life you may be a very disorganized person, but when it comes to your blog, your readers would want you to be one, because the information you have presented should make sense. Having a good theme shows how organized you are in terms of the information you have on your blog.
• It shows how much you value your visitors
  A visitor can easily judge form the first visit on your blog, whether you have taken the pain to arrange things for readers benefit or not. If you not have, you might have a bad theme, but if you really think your readers should read the information you have, you probably should use a good theme.
• It brands your blog.
  With that unique design, readers can instantly associate with you visually. Although this is more appropriate for custom design blogs, you can definitely make an impression with a free blog design as well.

I would certainly give more weightage to having a professional looking theme, along with having great content, as the two factors that will decide the success and popularity of your blog to anything else. And I strongly recommend all the blogspot users and wordpress free users to go for a good professional looking theme if they want people to read their blogs regularly and remember them.

I’m not trying to promote custom design themes here at all.  It is not necessary to have a custom design for your blog, you can very well manage to have a good impression with a free blog theme (like this one). You may have to tweak the CSS and styles a little bit to make it distinct, but that little effort will count much, believe me.

Well, if you need any further proof on this. I’m a good example I think. DailySEOblog had the new design implemented on October 27th and see the impact it as made in terms of reach and readership.

Well, some of that hike you see there in Oct start is due to SearchCamp, but the second hike you see is sure due to the new design. I had also seen a huge increase in the number of comments too with the new design. It was almost 200%, and I’m happy with it.