Vital Factors in Your Blog Theme

It's the sum of the parts that creates your overall blog theme impact. Part of the problem that cost me so much time is I didn't know what to look for at first. I had to go through hundreds of themes before I started to see patterns that made some themes more effective than others. The other thing that cost me so much time is that it's a combination of factors over any one thing. The overall look and feel is the sum of the parts. Here's what I found to be key factors in overall look and feel: * 2 Column vs. 3 Column Templates. This is a good macro-level decision because it helps divide your theme choices. While there's exceptions, my readers told me that in general they prefer two columns over three. They said it's a cleaner reading area, easier to know where to focus and it's simple to scroll the full page and see posts/pages on the left and the navigation/ads on the right. If you go with a three column theme then there's a few issues. Overall, try to find a theme where the column for posts is around two-thirds of the page and the two sidebars add up to around one-third. In general, for three columns, my users preferred a column on the left and a column on the right with posts in the middle, versus two columns on the right.
* Color Patterns. Colors and color combinations have a big impact on your blog's look and feel. This includes your background, banner, text and links. Your best judge is how you and your user's feel when they see the color combinations. They may not to explain the reaction, but they'll feel something. One of the guys on my team knows some science behind colors so he helped me better understand different reactions. You can check Crayola's America's 50 Favorite Colors and Kuler helps you explore, create and share color themes.
* Font combinations for titles, body, and sidebar. According to my users fonts and typography matters a lot. This includes font size, family and colors. This ones tough and can vary a great deal. You need to evaluate both Initial impact and readability over time. Again, unless you're a designer, you'll need to compare your gut reaction to different examples and test with your users. For the main post text, What I did find was that, in general, my users preferred a white or off-white background, with dark gray font (versus black) and Verdana font. They also prefer the post titles to clearly stand out, at least in size and style (for example Trebuchet or Ariel.)
* Post readability. Width is a big factor. My users told me that when the post column is too wide, scanning is more difficult, and that when it's too narrow, they have to scroll too much. Overall, they expect the post column to be two-thirds of the template width. Once the width is right, then the next issue is the
* Effective sidebar design. It seems like the features my user's cared about the most on the sidebars were: subscribe to RSS, search, categories, tags, recent posts and recent comments. There was a definite preference for search and subscribe to RSS to be at the top.
* User experience patterns for searching/browsing. If you have a large collection of posts this is particularly important, and pretty easy to test. If you know your posts, you should first test how quickly you can browse and search for specific posts. Then test the theme with your users. They won't have the same inside information you do, so this could be very revealing how well the patterns are working. I think the biggest factor here is using a "Read More" feature and showing just the first part of your posts when browsing categories or in search results. The longer your posts are, the more important this becomes.
* Effective use of images. Choosing images for banners and posts made a dramatic difference in how my focus group responded to some themes.
* Effective banner design. This can make or break the initial impact of your theme.
* Comment support. Some themes host user comments better than others. It really helps when you find a live example with many comments. That way you can see how well it scales while maintaining readability.
* Effective use of whitespace. My users pretty consistently commented on how effective whitespace really made some themes seem cleaner than others. I think the biggest factor here was spacing between blog sections and elements.
* Links. My users told me they prefer links that are easy to spot versus get lost in the text, but that don't steal the show. They also told me they prefer underlined links in posts, but don't underline in the sidebar (for example, categories, tag cloud, recent posts, ... etc.)
* Search Engine Optimization (SEO). I did notice that some themes seem optimized for SEO more than others. While my user's didn't notice this, search engines will. I think the main thing to pay attention across templates is how they use the title, description and header tags. You can tailor how your results will show up in search results. For categories, you should use permanent links. This improves your URLs for the search engine using more meaningful words. You should put your posts in only one category to avoid duplicate content from the search engine view. You should also only show parts of each post when browsing categories, to also avoid duplicate content (as well as make it easier for a human to quickly scan all your posts in a category.) See The Blogger's Guide to Search Engine Optimization - by Aaron & Giovanna Wall and Search Engine Optimization for Blogs - SEO.