Much is made of the art of writing a blog. Everywhere you turn there are top 10 lists on starting up and maintaining a blog.

The one thing that I don’t see much of though is on the styling or the theming of your blog. Heck many folks just go with the good old default theme that comes with any one of the different blog engines out there. for me this is a turn off when I run across them and I’m not likely to come back for a second time visit.

You can have some of the best thoughts on the web but if you don’t make the time spent reading at least appealing to the visitor’s eye, chances are they won’t be back. Of course some will say that with RSS feeds the need for a eye pleasing site isn’t necessary. Robert Scoble is a prime example of this philosophy. For him the big deal was a year or so ago changing the header graphic.

One of the great things about the WordPress blogging platform is that there is a rich base of talented people creating some well designed themes for us less than graphically talents folks to use. I’m sure the same applies to the other blogging platforms but my experience has mainly been with WordPress so that is what I will refer to the most.

One of the things I would strongly suggest to anyone getting ready to get into blogging as a serious hobby or occupation is to make sure you take the time to find just the right theme because it is your face to the world. Just as you would go into a meeting looking your very best the same care and consideration should go into the look of your blog.

Even before you go live take some time and search through all your options for themes. Try one on for a day or two. Stare at it - fill it with some posts and look at it some more - change to another blog - do some reading and then come back and look at your blog some more. Do the hyperlinks look right - how about the blockquotes and do the widgets behave nicely. Then let it sit for a day or two and repeat - if you even have a little niggling irritation try another theme.

This might appear to be over doing it but I; being the UI fussfart that I am, have found from experience that if you really care about how your blog is going to look it is better to take that time .. make sure that it feels right in every aspect … before opening the doors than having to change or fix stuff afterwards.

Even today I’m not happy with the theme used here and I am only marginally satisfied with the one that I have used over at Hodson Report - I still have to figure out why the AdSense displays on single pages but not the main page - very frustrating. I know some readers will say what are you talking about - it looks fine but it’s in the details that the irritations can build and if you get them all sorted out before going live you will save yourself hours of fixing and code hacking; not to mention your readers being interrupted as you work away in the background.

All the resources are out there for you to use .. to help you make a great looking blog that will frame your thoughts and opinions. You just have to take the time and use them … don’ t worry the Internet will be there in the morning;  and to help you out a bit here’s a small list of a few places I go to for themes.

Theme Resources

• WordPress ThemeViewer
• Weblog Tools Collection - Themes
• Blogging Pro
• GFXedit.com
• ThemePorter
• HeadsetOptions
• Brian Gardner

Conversation Tags: blogging, themes, WordPress