Are you ever satisfied with your blog design?

With the rapid developments in open source technologies since the late 90s, content management systems (CMS) became so very popular that it opened new avenues to facilitate user generated content on the World Wide Web.

As more and more people started adopting a particular CMS like WordPress, Blogspot, TypePad, etc, design and presentability became one of the main aspects of personal and professional blogging. Even today, a huge bunch of debut bloggers choose to stay with the default or simple themes that come integrated with the blog setup. I’m not gonna talk about them.

All those professional/seasoned bloggers that have self-hosted blogs tend to experiment with free and premium themes. What would be the satisfaction level of those that go for free/premium themes, spend a considerable amount of time tweaking, customizing them heavily? Though I don’t customize the themes heavily, I can rate my satisfaction level for a theme – it may hover around say 7 or 8 on a scale of 10. This rating lingers on for about 6-8 months, after which it drops to about 5.

I know everyone will argue that content is king, and design need not play an important role in defining the success of a blog. However, I believe that a nicely designed blog, easy on the eyes of the readers, with logical positioning of RSS subscription boxes and other functional tabs would definitely perform a whole lot better than those blogs with very little design consideration.

I like the following blogs – both for their content and the design:

• Digital Inspiration
• Office Snapshots
• CenterNetworks
• GigaOM
• The Huffington Post

There are thousands of other blogs with excellent design and good content, and yours can be one of them. So, if you are the type that has an eye for design, let me know your blog link. I’d be more than happy to visit your blog and get some design ideas.