Appearance is everything
I don’t really believe appearance is everything, which is just as well because I have virtually no skills in graphic design at all. I also don’t have any budget to hire a designer.
Fortunately you can now get some pretty good free web templates these days. I went to Free Layouts.com and I got both the Fab Swingers template and the template I’m using for this site.
I think the quality is better than some templates that I’ve paid designers for in the past.