[nate]

All the above and:

Site 1: The color on the first one is terrible and almost impossible to read. That really only matters if you care if people read what you write, which I'm not sure is so important. Porn is primarily visual (pics and video) unless its for women. I know when I look at porn, I look at pictures and video and completely ignore words. Im a fucking caveman though. Search engines care about test and shit for anything else, and the color similarity isnt bad enough that the spider will think you are trying to hide the text (which is an old-school trick for keyword stuffing a page). There is one case where you better always make damn sure there is enough contrast and thats between links and background. It does no good to have text link ads that are near invisible.

Site 2: The text/background contrast is better, but the color is sort of blah. It also has massive link visibility problems. If people cant see the link, they cant click it and buy something.

site3:Site 3 has better color, "FSU colors", (FSU sucks, KU rocks) but it has two problems that stick out. Links again: make them the same yellow as the navbar. And it scrolls left to right on my 1280 wide monitor, which is just wrong. I try to aim for no scrolling on 1024-wide monitors for blogs. Thats all in the CSS which can be a royal bitch to fix until you learn how css works. Even after you sorta learn how it works, CSS is a bitch. I think CSS was written specifically to weed idiots like me out of the website business, but thats pure conjecture.

Site4: nicest color schem of the bunch with good contrast, but also has the scroll problem.

Some things to leep in mind. Dont use dark backgrounds unless you heave a reason to. I can think of two off hand. If its a goth or BDSM site, black sort of fits the genre so its acceptable. Second, if you content is a little crappy and dark, a black background will make it look a little less dark (LOL, my MFA finally pays off). Americans are used to reading on white backgounds, so you might as well leverage that, and most "trustable" sites like banks and walmart have white backgrounds. Leverage that trust when possible.

Finally, as noted above, dont give away full video. Sonsors are falling all over themselves to give you free videos from 30 seconds to 5 minutes to use on your site. This covers your ass for the 2257 free speech and prior consent violation bullshit law and it helps by showing the viewer the type of material to expect from the sponsor.

As noted before, get off thumblogger and get real hosting and real domain names. I've got nothing againt thumblogger, but they can dump your sites on a whim, and all your work is for nought. Free hosting in general sucks and is unacceptable to people that might list your site, and paid hosting is pretty cheap.

Also, if you want to splog, use 10-20 rss feeds per site for pasts and 5 or so for sidebar feeds. And try to use some morhping feeds. I'm thinking that may be chaotic enough to fool the search engines into thinking it isnt a splog, but thats just a guess.

So far, everyone except me that has replied is pretty fucking smart and really knows what they are doing. Listen to them.