Mobile friendly themes are becoming more important. I'm trying to save up some money to change my theme later this year.

A free alternative to buying a mobile theme and/or an interim testing approach is to use a Wordpress plugin that automatically detects the user's device and presents your site either for regular computer browsers or for smartphones, etc. WPtouch is a free one that I use on several sites and there probably are others. Just configure the plugin and then log on from a smartphone to confirm the look. Very quick and dirty. I have no idea if this is optimized, but many Wordpress sites look fine with next to no work on a smartphone. I have not idea about whether a paid mobile + desktop/laptop theme would be better. Just saying that people can experiment with this approach.

Almost every blogger I know started with a free theme, but the most successful bloggers long ago upgraded to something like Thesis (I don't recommend this, I used to use it but moved away) or Genesis (what I use now). There are other popular options, but Genesis is popular for a reason.

Sometimes investing a little pays back a big return.

Mr. Utopia - your insight on the Canvas theme is very helpful and it's great that I can look at your site for a real example. I love the look of your site, so I have to imagine the theme would be good for me.

Larry - awesome feedback. I am going to implement some of your suggestions, especially regarding the unimportant links. I'm going to look things over and get rid of the unnecessary.  (BTW, I don't normally have pictures of reptiles on my site. I just thought it was funny because of the post title. I never thought I might drive people away! I might try to find a more pleasing picture for that one...)

Moneystepper - thanks for your feedback. I will remove the adsense banner up there. You are right, it is not necessary. I don't have any specific articles that I can dig up regarding the SEO claim. I do remember reading that a theme that allows for pagination rather than just an "older posts" link like on mine is better for SEO. Somehow it helps search engines? But I'm not sure how. And I might have read that from a theme developer, so maybe they are just trying to sell a product? I just had the general sense that new themes might have something going on that makes it easier for the bots to crawl them or something? But the feedback I'm getting here is that won't make much difference for me even if it were an incremental help. So I might just try to stick with the free theme for now, since I'm super cheap! :)

Thank you guys for the awesome responses! I truly appreciate you each taking the time to give me valuable feedback!

Also, I would remove the adsense banner right at the top. I had that there on moneystepper, but I think that it is better that the first thing the reader sees is your site and not some adchoices.

Do you have any evidence that paid themes improve SEO? I've not seen that before, so would be grateful if you could link to any articles explaining this.

Your website looks fine. Reasonable layout, white space, etc. As long as the look is acceptable, I doubt whether another theme will make much difference in traffic. One note about it right now is that the picture of a rattlesnake will freak out some people, because a portion of the population is terrified of reptiles. (I have lived for thirty years with one of those people. She would never revisit your site.) Pictures are great. Everybody loves furry animals. Think about the pictures that make people feel good, if you want them to stay. Think of this as your living room. Most visitors would not take a seat if the pictures on the wall made them nervous.

There is only so much you can do with a website itself to get more traffic. Decent content and you get search engine traffic. Posting a 1000+ word thoughtful article once a week sustained over time gets that traffic. Quality links elsewhere on financial sites that point to site will help. Anchor text helps. The key issue is sustained activity. If you do not like blogging for the sake of blogging, you will start to hate your hamster wheel. Social traffic is flighty, but some people like it. You have lots of comments, so somebody is stopping by.

If one is committed to personal finance blogging for the long-run, you will deepen your financial knowledge. In addition, however, if you do not commit to learning the technology, you will constrain yourself and have to pay for things you do not need to pay for. Websites are just a bunch of scripts that you can edit, if you learn how to do so. Google searching and forums are your friends to learning how. The Wordpress site has lots of information. Plugins will help as ready-made tools. It is confusing at the outset, but it begins to make sense the more you commit to learning the how-to of websites. Once you learn how to edit your scripts (safely - always have backups for restoration), you can change the look of your site however you want it to be.

Some specific comments about the site:

* Tried the Hellobar on several sites and tossed it. Little yield for wasted screen real estate. Plus it messed up other plugins.

* Every link on the home page (and other pages) tells Google what is important about your site. Unimportant links dissipate your "link juice".

* Are the blogroll sites your friends? If not, I could ditch the blogroll

* I would edit the footer script to ditch the Powered by Wordpress link

* I would edit the various scripts to ditch the links to the tag, author, and the other archives because they also dissipate your link juice.

* Same with sidebar archives

* Also kill the "Join 23 other subscribers" phrase above subscribe. I tend to avoid supplying numerics and let the user decide if they like what you have, rather than judging the site by metrics.

Again, if traffic building is the concern, what you do offsite is much more important than what you do onsite. If the look is acceptable and your content is decent quality, raise the visibility of your site elsewhere.

Larry

I actually went with the theme you're considering: Canvas from Woo. I can't say that use of theme has had any impact on traffic (I have nothing to compare it to since it's all I've used). I can say that theme has lots of options that make it pretty easy to customize and, for the most part, is pretty user friendly. You can do lots of stuff with Canvas, but I don't have the skills to do fancy customization. The support from Woo is great too. I haven't needed anything from them in a while, but when I first launched I ended up opening around 3 tickets or so. They respond fairly quickly (usually within a day although I think they're mainly in Europe so there are time zone differences). It may take several exchanges back and forth to fix whatever it is (helps if you clearly explain what you're trying to do). Their site also has forums and other self-help areas with lots of info, but I didn't get too much help out of that since the people asking the questions always seemed to be after something slightly different than what I was. Keep in mind that if you are wanting to do really big customization of their themes, Woo will point you to 3rd party providers to do that. But, they'll help with lots of the basic stuff and even seemed to answer questions in my tickets that dealt with specific customization on my site.

Hope that helps some.

I'm considering the Canvas theme from Woo themes since it seems pretty straightforward and is fairly inexpensive. I would need something with fairly good support since the tech/programming stuff is not my strong suit and I would be worried about screwing things up with the switch.

Feedback and recommendations are greatly appreciated!