I adore simple designs like TechCrunch’s and Chris Brogan’s. Chris Pearson’s works really fascinated me. Yea, I’m one of those people that are scrupulous about their blog’s theme.

I strongly believe that a unique & custom design is more important than content.

WHY??
Because when a visitor lands on your site for the first time he is more interested in the content. Analysis prove that a visitor coming along with Google juice or your comments on other blogs… scans first few lines in 5-10 seconds, which decides his stay before he hits the comments area or else he will just add up another bounce unit.

On the other hand a Unique Design will catch up his attention and the user will surely look at the sidebars and other elements. This will help a blogger to increase the readership and may be he likes other stuff on your blog!!

For example I created http://www.mohitaneja.com which is a unique WordPress blog layout and I got a lot of appreciation for the layout and my visitors motivated me to start my own freelance business (http://www.cssjockey.com).

I proudly accept that a single layout helped me to be a well established freelance web-developer!!

I checked John Chow dot Com’s layout too. It’s a simple and effective custom design which highlights each section very well!! I am sure he will notice upward trends on visit time lengths

Mohit Aneja
{CSS:Jockey;}