Many blogs use the same templates or skins for the design. While the design does not really affect people who read your blog via RSS feed, but it affects any first time blog visitor and everyone who likes to read the blog from the web browser. The more unique a blog design the better it is to build recognition and branding. If a blog looks like 20 others the visitor has seen, your blog will not stick out and you will lose out on visitors as people tend to forget about you really quick then. In the past I have been using free Wordpress templates with minor modifications. The last one was pretty much stock and as I did not see that template before I (almost) thought that this template would not be widely used at all. It was originally made for Wordpress 1.5 and was not ported to 2.x of Wordpress.

Well, I was wrong and ran into a blog with the same template today. That bothered me and I decided to follow the rule described above and make my blog more unique. The most visible thing is the header and so I started working on a new design and image for the header. As I am “graphically challenged” it took me a while to come up with something that I liked. I wanted the new header to be like a business card for my blog. Now the header tells a first time visitor right away what this blog is about. The problem with many blogs is to find out what is their main specialty. Often there is no way to tell what a blog is about if you hit an older posting through a search engine. The homepage might have a small snippet of text explaining the purpose of the blog, but archived articles do not. Or the blog owner does not bother at all to tell what his main intent for the blog is. I had a small snippet of text already describing the purpose of my blog, but again it was only seen on the homepage and not on the different archive pages.

My new header is fixing 2 things at the same time. First of all it is completely unique. And second I was able to manage to design it with a small sticky note build in explaining what this blog is all about. The sticky note is completely integrated into the design of the header and in a spot where visitors can easily see it. I showed it to a friend before deciding to make this the new header image and he liked it.

Anyway - the lesson learned for me is: Make your Blog look unique + make sure your visitors know what your blog is about. Just because they find a (one) posting of yours that matches their search term, it does not mean that your blog is really of interest to them. But you might be able to catch their interest by pointing out what your blog is really about.

PS: If you read this blog via RSS feed, please stop by on the website, take a look at the new header and leave me a comment with if your impression (good? or bad?)