I'm not trying to get affilation on just that, but it does play an important factor as a professional buttons makes you think it's a professional site.. and users tend to click the animated 'eye candy' style buttons on link pages more than any others. My site is game development which is closely related to ESF as..
[1] It's a game
[2] It was developed from Half-Life
[3] It has many stages of development (i.e maps, models etc.)