A standard Wordpress theme or a unique design?

It’s Friday evening, the end of a busy but interesting week…  Time to write about the dilemma, I proposed to you on Monday!

Do you go with a standard Wordpress Theme or do you need a unique design?

The most important things I’ve learned from the people that left comments on my blog are:

• Keep it simple… And I like that.  Wordpress makes it really simple for a non technical person to set up a blog or make a site without the help of a webmaster.  You can easily add plugins that make your blog ’sociable’: you can make it easy for people to share your post or sign up for a newsletter.
• Content is more important than layout.  What you talk about on your blog is what will make people come back to get to know you better.  A pretty layout will not do that for you.  Content is king!

On the other hand:

• A clean and user friendly layout will help your readers to feel more relaxed and find their way to the information they are looking for.
• It depends on the industry you are in.  A healing practitioner will need another type of site then an online marketer in order to be credible and considered trustworthy.
• There are a lot of blogs that offer great content.  A professional design may help you brand yourself as an expert, stand out from the crowd.

With this information in my head, I went into a meditation yesterday.  That’s my way of dealing with these dilemma’s.  I am in the process of setting up a new blog, so it was time to put in to action all the things I’ve been learning the last few months and to find out how I want my new blog to be.

This is what I came up with:

• The blog should represent who I am, and what I stand for.  It is important for me to have my vibration in the design and the layout, people have to be able to ‘feel’ what I am about.  So I will use a theme that is easy to customize so I can make it my own, but the design should still reflect who I am: natural, authentic, a woman and committed to helping others.
• I am ‘ a little’ chaotic, but I hate chaotic websites, so I want it to be clean and crisp.  I want to be ‘happy’ and ‘proud’ when I visit my own website.
• I will focus on the content now and maybe let a professional designer play around with my design later.  The most important thing is giving people what they are looking for and build a relationship with them.  I know, for one, that I am with my coach, Connie Rachel Green, because somebody referred me to here.  And now I love her because she is reachable and going out of her way to make her group coachees successful.  And the design of her website, which is by the way, a standard Wordpress theme, has nothing to do with that.
• I went for the free Atahualpa theme, which I love because you can bend it any way you want it or use it as it is.
• I am considering using video on my website instead of a picture, as it speaks more to people than an image.  But I’m not yet sure about this.  I still feel that it is important to have one and the same picture all over the Internet to build a brand. Maybe I will do both.  I liked the little pop-up thing that Jason Armbruster is doing on his blog.  He lets his head pop-up to do some explaining about himself and the free give-away.  It’s something to consider…
• No, I am not going to show you the new blog.  It is not finished yet!

But I did bump into some interesting content while browsing through the blogs I found with the comments on Monday’s post:

• Laura asks you if you are ‘Cut out to be an entrepreneur’ on her blog.  She gives you some very interesting points to think about if you are really serious about being an entrepreneur.
• Deborah gives you some interesting insights on how to build a Blog Alliance with other bloggers, in order to help each other out.
• Deb dares you to make blog comments ‘dofollow‘ and invites you to discuss with her the pro’s and contra’s of doing so.
• Alice has a LOT of good information for real estate agents to promote themselves online.  Visit her website at http://propertyadguru.com/
• And Rodney has 4 reports you can download immediately from his website: one on fear of failure, one on improving your sales process, another one on planning and one on relations.  Check them out!
• And then last but not least: the solomompreneur website of Melanie.  She is the living example that moms can do it!  Right now she is promoting the “Leading Moms in Business” 2010 Competition. Go see!