How design effects visitor behavior

I've recently had an entire makeover of my site's design to a more professional look. We've always had a dark theme to signify a more "underground" feel to the site (I guess you can say that...). It seemed my target audience liked that look better; at least that's what I heard from all my members.

I decided things had to change and I wanted to get a new design that gave the feeling of what our niche is: Xbox.

Ever since we've had our new theme went live, I've noticed an improvement in all my stats (though uniques have remained pretty even). At first I thought it may have just been a temporary trend, but I've been tracking it for a month now and I'm quite happy with what I've seen. Here's some of my stats:

Before:
Pageviews/day: ~45k
Pageveiws/visit: ~5
Time spent on site: 5-6 min
Bounce Rate: 55%


After:
Pageviews/day: ~100k
Pageviews/visit: ~12
Time spent on site: 8 min
Bounce Rate: 29% (which is probably what is contributing to most of the other stat improvements)

I've also noticed a nice increase in my ad revenue. I was making around $25/day before, and now it's been $40+/day.

I'm posting this because I think these stats can show a lot of forum admins out there that the skin you choose really does matter and will effect your visitors' behavior and that by putting a little money into a more professional and UNIQUE design, that it can bring even greater returns in the future!

I hope this helps others and I would like to hear from others if they've had a similar experience.

Great improvements. New template looks very clean. Did you take a screenshot of the old template from comparison?

Internet Archive Wayback Machine

There's a small screen shot here:
se7ensins.com - Site Information from Alexa

I can look around for a bigger one but I'm not sure if I have one around anywhere. I guess I can view the old skin but I'm not sure with the update to 3.7 would have an effect on how some of the alignment works.

Thumbnail at Alexa has been updated I believe.

I'll try to see if I have a screen shot lying around. The only thing I have is the early designs of it that I was making and it really doesn't look as good as it did on the forums since I changed many things. If anything, I'll reupload my images and edit some of the code :P