Hi,
ooookay, this is going to be partly positive, partly negative – and it’s my very own personal opinion, no offense meant.
I like the basic look including colors and its crispness and the way everything truly meshes. That’s actually a BIG compliment, as too many blog themes simply don’t have these qualities, visually and designwise.
But…
Personally I wouldn’t be attracted to read this blog, even if the topics were topics I were interested in.
That’s because this type of built and design gives me that “cheap corporate” feeling, and that’s something I very automatically, instinctually (if you will), associate with someone wanting to go after my wallet. The one main problem are the ads, which raise this “cheapo feeling”, and due the ads placement, which – oh so very yes – looks just like “a pro for a cheapish corporate site” would do them, which forces the content also into the exact places where these sites usually have their content.
“Cheap” means by the way a) that good company/corporate designs/sites don’t run ads, and the few which do, run only their own, and b) that after a couple of years in the net, you learn to identify such sites with one glance (sufficient to immediately click away from), which have only very minor quality content, but lots of marketing push.
The end result for me is that I don’t feel comfortable and attracted to reading anything on sites having “that look”. This doesn’t make me feel genuinely intriguing enough.
Which actually is, in view of the crisp nice visual design, a pity, and it’s a pity if you plan on writing good content for this blog.
If I was you, I’d drive that “spareness” further yet, dump the ads completely and use the freed space to incorporate something intriguing or personal.
And as an additional comment: for me there’s just one constellation and design which truly works with ads, which is a real online newspaper. People, myself included, expect ads in a newspaper and are capable of automatically filtering them out (visually/perception-wise), because that’s something you train yourself to do from the day you start reading them. Thus, with a classical newspaper design and setup, ads are far less offensive. Also, the classical newspaper setup gives the stories a special kind and type of import through layout, which enables the reader to quickly discern stories from ads. So that’s about the only type of site where I do readily accept ads (wouldn’t be clicking them though).
