My friend Dan was asking me about Themes/Layouts for his new blog/site. It sparked a bit of a rant and he encouraged me to share it.

Daniel: Ok, back to theme talk: I get a lot of advice from you on this kind of stuff and I love it and it's valid...BUT considering my audience/customer who lives on FB and is most likely, at least early on in the game, going to be blog theme ignorant... would a theme like the one everyone else has but with my added graphical flair be more appealing to them as opposed to the classic header/content/sidebar/footer look?

Not a loaded question: I want your honest opinion, taking out your bias towards what YOU want it to look like or not look like

Me: Hard to answer, but I would return with this - analytics... Remember last year we looked at website entry point: homepage is always going to be you #1 entry point, but it may account for only 30-40% of total traffic. Most guests are going to enter through a single content post - whether sent by you on Facebook/Twitter or discovered via search.

In content-driven models, the homepage is rarely the entry point... with that in mind, A) content has to be FANTASTIC, and B) appearance is important, but it can't be allowed to detract from content... when you bury the content "below the fold" (requiring at least one PgDn to get to it on the homepage) you are making it difficult for the customer... to me, it's a misunderstanding by the content provider of what the customer wants...

Not say you, but many folks will fill all that stuff out Header, Welcome, What We Do, chunky Menu because they think that it looks cool, it creates a great brand statement, and maybe even has the intent of guiding the guest... but the fact is: No one cares what you say about yourself (at least not at first and not for a long time).

So for me, layout isn't really crucial. Presenting a professional product is very important. But anything that distracts or detracts from content is self-harm.