To design or not to design? If I’d been able to answer that question, this blog would have started weeks ago. But I couldn’t decide if I liked any of the WordPress.com themes on offer, or if I wanted to design my own in Blogger. In actual fact, if this still matters, it soon won’t. I read most of my favourite blogs via their (text only) RSS feed, in Bloglines. I almost never see their websites, and I genuinely don’t know what many of them look like. I don’t know why, but I just looked at Steve Rubel’s MicroPersuasion site – a feed I read every day – and got quite a shock!
Response
I’m a Bloglines addict too, but I think design still matters because the majority of the people reading your site for the first time will do so directly rather than through a feed. If they don’t have a good first impression, they won’t subscribe to your feed. And like it or not, some people can’t look beyond the design and focus on the actual content.