The choice of a design for a blog, can quickly become one of the most important parts of the strategy of a blogger. When you want to monetize a blog or introduce a concept more professional, the design of your space is fundamental to this. Here on the blog, having entered the final layout (which is currently in force), the number of regular subscribers rose about 25%. It is also important to understand that good design is not proper to do with beautiful structures, but with functional structures. It is much more important a functional structure and going to meet the needs of its visitors, than as a dysfunctional design very nice but ... 

For all those who have some knowledge of editing HTML and CSS, this guide can serve as a guideline for the construction and editing of his new layout, but need not necessarily be a guide to meet the requirement. Better than anyone, you know what is important to you and your goals.

1. IDENTIFY YOUR GOALS

As with practically everything that is around the blogosphere, it is necessary before starting to define the objectives of what is about to perform. You must explain yourself, you want to design a blog to attract more visitors, or you want to create a highly profitable blog, or you want to create a blog that captivates its visitors more quickly, or create a blog that has a rate of subscribers very high, among other options. 

Setting this makes it easier to start and develop a blog strategy around that objective. If perchance a platform using Wordpress or MovableType, for example, be sure it has at its disposal numerous plugins and extensions created by various communities, which will save enormous time in the development of micro applications and options for your blog. 

2. IDENTIFY YOUR AUDIENCE 
Like the objectives, it is important to know who is working. After defining the niche market of your blog, it is easier to understand what kind of audience is working. If you build a blog on technology, know in advance that will have a high density of young readers, looking for last-minute news about new products and technologies. 
If you build a blog about making money, you know that your audience is mixed and composed largely of players looking for new ways to monetize blogs and websites. 

3. IDENTIFYING SPECIAL NEEDS 
Depending on the area of operation of its new blog, is once again very important, decide what are the vital needs of your blog. A blog of this kind, it is important for example have a list of commentators, to stimulate participation in the blog, as well as two lists of popular articles, one in the sidebar and footer in another, facilitating the new visitors to filter the articles really important . The so-called pillars of the blog articles. 
Another type of areas, may be relevant to advertising banners, the photos in the entry of articles, articles in full or summary, the presence of social networks, among other things. 
Identify these needs, placing it in the skin of a visitor, it is extremely important and smart. 

4. The Skeleton INITIAL DESIGN 
One of the applications you use most like to draw skeletons of projects for the web, is to OmniGraffle. With this software, you can draw very simple structures, study them, present them to clients (if necessary), among other things, without having the proper scrolling in Photoshop or other creative software, which usually require more time to the construction of such structures simple. 

Start by drawing the foundations of your project, taking into account the new rules of the 960 Grid System, for example. Skip over this phase of development is a fatal mistake for those who want to build a solid plan and really user friendly. 

Start by taking into account some of the most important aspects of your new layout, including: 
movement 
dimensions 
images 
Color 
type text 
positioning 

Using these rules, you should be able to strategically place all the elements of its new blog, especially the search engine, the head-ing the information, banner advertising, among other things. Once you know where to begin reading, the reader will decide what to read or not read. 
Knowing how the reader feels (you are a reader), the easier you can apply the rules to extract the maximum of each page of your blog. 

5. CHOOSE KEY ELEMENTS 
After having the basic structure, we use the selection of all things visual: colors, fonts, images, patterns, backgrounds, among other things. All these key elements must be properly framed with the structure and purpose of the blog, as mentioned in the first 3 points of this article. 
A good source of inspiration for this type of work, such as magazines are printed. They contain information in your area, not in a format similar to the web, but can easily be seen in the structure of your layout. 


Using all this material, is extremely easy to define a new palette of colors for our project, given that all materials are enquadráveis the original idea. 
Try this method extract the maximum you can, as it is easier then apply it to your new blog, not incurring the mistake of using a color scheme very hit or applicant in the area, for example. 

6. PLANNING POST DESIGN 
After having the structure of the new blog format, drawn in lines, it is necessary for the development of the project in Photoshop or other software of any creativity. After having positioned the elements properly, print the design and start your new plan. 
Start by asking yourself on some very important things: 
There is flexibility to add more advertising banners? 
There is way to restructure the content is necessary? 
Is there way to change the look of the layout, without moving into the enterprise? 

After properly plan the initial layout that developed, it is time to make adjustments to avoid large programming projects. There are certainly things that are not thought possible to achieve and / or require too much knowledge / investments and surely he forgot to plan so many things. Imagine your blog in the next 4 months. It would be functional? Miss something important? Could easily add this functionality? 

7. Type the code HTML and CSS 
After having cobbled his new blog, it is time to start the development phase. If by chance has no knowledge of HTML and CSS programming, you can always imagine the structure of your new project and deliver it to the development of any creative enterprise. 
If you have some personal knowledge, you can apply them in developing the theme you just imagine, including adapting other issues already on the market. There are several high quality premium templates which can be adjusted, by removing the need to plan everything from root unnecessarily.