Design is more important than you think: Your mother’s right — first impressions count, and they can count for cash money. If you’re serious about blogging, don’t stick with a n unaltered top10 Wordpress theme no matter how cool you think it is. You want to separate and elevate yourself from the blogging masses, and its impossible to do if you look exactly the same as them. Easy to say, hard to do, but absolutely necessary if you don’t have the money to pay for a private ground-up theme: learn CSS and a photoeditor of choice, and learn to tweak your theme yourself, so that your blog looks professional, stands out, and screams “yes, I am worthy of your attention!”.

I absolutely agree too this. A blog needs to look unique and professional. But personally I believe it’s better to have a standard looking blog template than using an ugly blog template that you have made yourself. And when it actually comes down to it, doesn’t the content add more values than the template? It’s like you paint the outside of your house so people won’t see how crappy it looks inside. And if you have a ugly template people may think it looks so bad that the content can’t be any good - even though the content may be better than good.