When I first started NICKED Up one of the things I thought about was design. After quality content, design might be the most important part of getting visitors to your sites and making money. The design of a web site or blog determines how readable your posts are and how well you can work advertisements into the layout. A good design needs to take advantage of the hot zones for ads, but keep the ads from distracting too much from your content. It really is a balancing act.

Paul Scrivens, the CEO of 9rules, recently wrote a post titled Templates and Branding which I thought was very interesting.

How important is it for a site or page to differentiate itself from the rest of the crowd?

I believe it’s very important. A unique design helps visitors remember your site. With millions of blogs being created every month there is only so much we can do though. If you have a site which you’re trying to make money from, there are some well-known advertising techniques that work a lot better than others. If you choose to ignore certain ad placements you’ll miss out on a lot of income.

In his post, Scrivens mentioned that all of the sites on Weblogs, Inc. looked the same at one point. This isn’t a bad thing though, because they are all part of one network. It has obviously worked for them if their recent sale to AOL is any indication.

As I look through the blogs on the new b5media network I see they have 2 main designs being used but with different color combinations for each site. I really like the design they’re using at Play Girlz. The layout is simple, yet it stands out, and is very effective.

I’ve decided to mix it up a little more with NICKED Up. A lot of the sites in my network will have different designs. Most of the site swill share at least one design technique with another site, but overall they’ll have different looks. This means it’ll take longer to launch a new site, but I think it will be worth it. I’ll get to add a little bit more of my own touch to my blogs.