This is the second post in my 6 Beginning Blogger Mistakes series.

Many beginning bloggers make the mistake of registering a spending lots of money on a fancy looking domain name, installing Wordpress and proceeding to spend the next twelve hours downloading a million templates and cycling through every color choice. They spend a huge chunk of their lives designing a 125×125 ad to go on Entrecard. Finally they sit back and admire all the pretty colors and the beauty of their site’s layout. Oh, maybe at this point they think about starting to write some content. Stupid.

I can’t tell you how many very successful sites look like shit and feature an overused unedited template. If you don’t believe me please visit Strobist. The guy uses Blogger (doesn’t host his own site), uses a default template and uses white text on black. By all logic he should be a miserable failure. But his content is great and therefore makes a living off his site. True story.

I’ve seen some very pretty sites on the net. But much like pretty women you’ll only use them once if there’s no reason to keep coming back. People aren’t going to come back just to look at your nifty Web 2.0 interface and awesome plugins. They want to read something interesting. Hell, when I like a site I subscribe to it and barely ever see the website proper.

And let’s talk about another thing that gets screwed when you focus entirely on aesthetics, SEO. That’s Search Engine Optimization. That means making sure Google and other search programs like your website and want to send visitors. Trust me, you want this. On other blogs I’ve gotten hundreds of visitors from Google a day. It’s quite lovely and they keep coming back if you follow up with good quality. There are a billion resources out there focusing on SEO, maybe I’ll go into it later. Short version is this: keep it simple.

There’s a very famous company named Apple Computers. Don’t know if you’ve ever heard of them. They make a decent living by putting form before function. Every one of their products is beautiful and some even have good innards but they’re all beautiful. And do you know what? Apple has a tiny market share. You wouldn’t know if by listening to fan-boy bloggers but a very small chunk of the world actually uses Apple’s computers. They’ve only had one major success in the past 15 or so years, the iPod. Why? Because it just works. It’s good looking but the thing is easy to use, not insanely overpriced for what it is and works day in and day out. And if it wasn’t for the iPod the company very likely would be broke.

Don’t be like the majority of Apple’s products and first think about how a pretty face can cover up crappy content. Focus on making a good, working site first and then start worrying about how you can tweak it.

Look at this blog. It’s a simple template that I took thirty minutes to edit. It’s easy and will work until I can hire someone to design me a more beautiful template. But by then I’ll have a very steady stream of visitors and it’ll be worth my while.

Stay tuned for the next installment of my 6 Beginning Blogger Mistakes series where I contradict everything I said in this post in my Focusing Too Little on Aesthetics (IBM Syndrome) entry.