Nobody Cares What Your Blog Looks Like

March 9th, 2007 | Blogging Basics

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Alright, they actually do, but not as much as you think.

Over the past few months, I’ve had three different bloggers approach me about the design of their blogs. The first was Mexico Medical Student, and he was actually the impetus for this entire blog. After that came docinthemachine, and finally oncRN.

It’s interesting, often the people who are most concerned about the design of their blog are the ones who least have a need to be concerned. Two of those three blogs look just fine. Now, they might not end up in a gallery of blog designs, but they’re perfectly fine.

The most important part of a blog is your writing. Period. Everything else isn’t even secondary — it’s tertiary at best.

So here’s my golden rule of blog design: the design should not take away from your writing. That’s it. Anything else is gravy. People do care what your blog looks like, but they’re not terribly picky. They just don’t want to be annoyed by it.

Now in oncRN’s case, I told her that I did feel like she would benefit from a better design. The design she’s using now, while fine, just doesn’t match her writing, and so I feel like it detracts because of that. The others, though, I felt worked just fine.

The nice thing about using WordPress, though, is that it’s so easy to switch your themes. Download a new one, switch over to it and see what your readers think. If they don’t like it, just pick another one. No problem.

Here are a few sites where you can find great free (or very cheap) WordPress themes:

But again, the bottom line is that you just don’t want the design to get in the way. Definitely upgrade your design if it truly is ugly, but don’t sweat it otherwise.

Comments

  • The Best Free WordPress Themes
    The Best Free WordPress Themes

    April 21, 2007 at
    5:28 pm

    [...] realized while looking through a lot of the WordPress themes that I linked to last week (Nobody Cares What Your Blog Looks Like) that the majority of them just weren’t great. That weren’t terrible by any means, but [...]


     
  • Drikatruu
    Drikatruu

    June 1, 2007 at
    12:08 pm

    Design sometimes gets in the way of writing. Less is often more. And yes, the more optimized a template design is, the more difficult you will find to change it to your needs. With this realization I wrote a super simple template with easy-to-customize features. Would be interested to know what you think. Greetings and congrats to your own very stylish site.


     

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