Change of blogger template makes a big difference to traffic

Update (27 June 2013): No I was wrong: that increase in traffic is some weird artifact of that template (a template which I quickly grew to hate and reverted back to something simple a few days ago).

I was experimenting with blog templates last week. I changed my template to one of the new Blogger dynamic templates.  It looked better than the last one, but I didn't think it would make any practical difference.

I was surprised to see this week that my traffic numbers have soared over 300% on last week. Initially I thought I got some coverage at a popular blog or website, but there was no specific traffic source or destination page. I also noticed this surge traffic started on the same day I changed the template.

So there you go... one click and an instant 300% traffic increase!

Unfortunately I didn't have any screen shots of the blog as it was before, and I was unable to find the exact same template again, but this approximately what it looked like before (left) and after (right).