Many of the designers I work with are bloggers themselves, but some are not, so this is intended to be an introduction to what goes into a blog design.

When I refer to blog design on this page, I’m specifically talking about the part of the process that happens in a graphics program like Photoshop or Fireworks. The part that happens after that (where I take the design file and turn it into a working design) is what I refer to as coding—and a lot of designers aren’t interested in that at all (which is fine by me!).
Elements of a blog design
I’m going to start by defining some terms that I use when talking about blog elements.

I’m not just talking about how your blog looks. The actual code behind the design has a much bigger impact on your online success than you might guess.

Wendy of eMoms at Home did a great writeup on ProBlogger yesterday where she talked about the importance of a well-coded blog template and described the phenomenal results she saw when I implemented a much better coded them for her (the number of people that Google sent her doubled the next day). Wendy explored the reasons for that and the result was the ProBlogger post.

I want to go into a little more background here so that you’ll understand why the theme change made such a huge difference. Most people choose a blog theme based strictly on how it looks (and that’s definitely a valid concern, since it’s setting the tone for your blog) but aren’t aware that the behind-the-scenes details of the code can drastically affect the way the search engines “feel” about your blog.

I recently read a post about tracking the factors that contribute to good search engine rankings. There are lots of factors to keep track of, but if you do a good job, your blog will get tons of new visitors from Google, Yahoo!, MSN, etc.

The post was specifically …