Summarize the contents from your "Why Varely?" section into a sentence or two introduction for the top of the page that goes over a) what is this b) the problem are you trying to solve and b) what can bloggers expect to gain from using the service.
The layout puts emphasis on the navigation, not the content, which is a turn off to both readers and writers. I'd also nix the logo/headline typeface you're using; it's really unflattering and the antialiasing effects from Photoshop don't help it. Bump up the size of the actual user content all around.
It also looks as though if the blogger doesn't know how to format a post, it will all end up being one big block of text, so look into a way to streamline that (Redactor.js, Markdown, etc) so that they don't feel like there's a learning curve. I'd also consider making the profile pages a little bit more flashy/ego-friendly to make the authors feel better about contributing.
Hope that helps!
I assume the blog will be monetized with advertising. If so, have you thought about a revenue sharing agreement with your writers based on ad clicks? Sort of like Huffington post, but instead of paying the writers on articles submitted (or nothing at all), you could pay them a piece of the ad revenue they generate. Sites like squidoo.com and newsvine.com follow this model.
The revenue sharing article market appears crowded, but can turn out to be lucrative if you differentiate in some way (like gurufocus).
You say you're trying to provide a platform that is maintenance free but what about say, tumblr, twitter, blogger, reddit, and all-the-others? Maybe you have more planned for a future release but I think you need to incentivise in someway. The topic categories seem restrictive or too broad. Hope that helps, good luck :)
I would say some of the benefit, and again this comes more with scale is that the content will be arranged mainly in two ways being by popularity and newest which when compared to reddit is similar though the culture for reddit is more of posting links and discussing other peoples content where I'd like original content on Varely. Definitely do need to think of clearer incentives.
Also the topics are just popular ones but you can post about anything you'd like and tag your post with it. I should also clear that up too. I really appreciate the feedback!
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