Is the visual design of my new blog important?

I have just logged onto my new blog and I was really happy to see that I have received my first two comments! How fantastic, it means that I'm not the only person viewing my blog, which already makes it feel rewarding!

So, what's next?

So far I've set up a blog, I have written my two posts, I've added a couple of images to break up the copy and hopefully make it look a little less dull and I've found myself thinking to myself what should I do next. Thankfully, I've found my mind being flooded with ideas however I can't implement them all at once, so I have to prioritise. There were a couple of obvious ideas that stood out from the rest and I have desided to focus on them first.

My first idea, as you would probably expect, as after all I am suppose to be a marketeer, was how best to launch my blog and let the World know that it exists. There are obviously many different ways to do this and over the next couple of weeks I plan to try and more importantly measure the results of all of my marketing activities.

To help me do this, today I subscribed to the free version of Site Meter a statistical tool that was recommended to me recently. I simply copied the Java Script code that they provide, customised the look and feel of it by simply ticking a few boxes and pasted it into the relevant "add element" part of this blog. Now I can tell how many people visit my blog and perhaps more importantly where they came from, or how they found out about the High Impact Blog?

One of the things that has been on my mind, especially when I was considering what to do next is the visual design of my blog. I don't personally think that my blog looks visually very good and considering I run a website design and internet marketing agency my instant thoughts were that I should invest some additional time and effort making my blog visually unique and inspiring. When we build websites for our clients we always try to design something that is unique, preofessional and stylish and (hopefully) doesn't look like an off the shelf template that can be purchased and downloaded for a few hundred dollars. Obviously, there is loads more that goes into build a successful website part from design such as search egine optimisation (SEO) etc however hopefully you already know this, if not there is lots of imformation on the High Impact website.

As you can already see, I have taken a still image copy of the header which appears on our High Impact website (please click here if you would like to see the flash animated version, which even though I say it myself, looks really cool, especially the birds!) So has the header added anything? You can be the judge of that, because after all I have built this blog for you to enjoy and I would be interested to hear your opinions.

I must make it very clear at this stage that I am not a "designer". I have opinions about design and like to think that I can offer creative ideas and input into projects however I can not turn these visual ideas into reality without help. I'm probably best described as a businessman and marketeer, specialising in interent marketing and search engine optimisation (SEO). I have a limited knowledge of Photoshop and Fireworks (and as a result of this project I will probably spend alittle bit more time learning how to use these software package better). I'm certain that when I go into the office tomorrow and show our Head of Design how badly I have bastardised his original header design and reproduce it in such a low resolution , he will want to redo it for me (well hopefully).

So coming back to the question that I posed in the title of this blog post, how important is the visual design of a blog and should I (and the creative people that I am lucky enough to work with) do some work to it before I start to market this blog? I have read articles and scientific studies about the effects of design on the "bounce rate" of websites. But is a blog a website? I guess it is (kind of), although the purpose of a blog is very different to the core purpose of the majority of websites.

As we all know there is no point in working hard on building a blog or a website that nobody visits. We all crave "traffic" or readers of our work and we all hope that those that do visit will leave positive feedback and interesting observations (or if you own an ecommerce site, make a purchase!). So many of us invest time, money, launching and marketing our work to the World or our target audience. Some of us are lucky enough to be successful (for those that struggle generating traffic, I will address this in future posts) in generating traffic however sometimes find that we can not retain it. After all of that hard work no body wants to let visitors slip through their fingers and not view the pages or posts of content that we have worked so hard on.

I was recently involved in an interesting experiment which focused on this very subject. We took a website which has a vast number of pages and around 3000 daily visitors. However the design of the website was..........actually there wasn't really any design or branding, it was just words (well written and interesting words, hopefully much like my blog) . We wanted to see, if with a small (we would have liked to do much more) amount of professional design could reduce the bounce rate on our friends website. Bounce rate by the way for those of you not familar with this term is worked out as a percentage and it measures the amount of people who land on your web page and then either stay their or click the dreaded "back button" to continue their search. The result was very encouraging, we managed to improve the bounce rate by 10%. So instead of having to invest in generating 10% more traffic we managed to better utilise the traffic that the site was already getting by improving the design and making the site look more professional and better laid out.

Fortunatley, today I don't really have this problem, as the stat counter on this blog clearly shows. I'm hardly receiving any traffic however it is my intention that I will. Talking about that, I guess, I should set myself a target. A million visitors in the first year sounds like a testing and pretty daunting challenge! So be it, we will crack on a bottle of Champagne if the stat counter has reach seven digits by this time next year and two or three if it does it sooner!! (don't forget to tell your friends, all visitors welcome :) )

Continuing to answer my own question, at this stage (my blog is only two days old) I don't think that i'm going to lose any sleep over the fact that I have chosen to use the most basic template design offered by Google. I'm not going to spend a load of time over the next week building a unique, customised template (this may all change when our Head of Design sees this) and instead i'm going to focus on writing more posts and my first marketing activity for the blog.

So what's this going to be? I aim to list my blog on as many relevant blog directories as I can find. Earlier I did a quick search on Google, typing in the phrase "blog directory" and there appears to be plenty! I'll spend a couple of hours this week adding my blog details and let you know how I get on!

In conclusion to the question I set myself, today, I'm of the opinion that a blog is more about the content than the visual design and that the visual design shouldn't have much of an effect on the bounce rate. It is my belief that the majority of people don't expect a blog to be visually creative or have that instant wow factor! What do you think?