One of my clients – Yahoo! Columnist Penelope Trunk - recently featured me in her regular Coachology post section.

As part of the post, I offered to help redesign the blog of one of her readers …

The winner was Sheryl Sisk Schelin of The Inspired Solo.

Sheryl, who is an attorney, seeks to offer “guidance, support, and assistance to solo lawyers and those who’d like to make the leap, by providing productivity tips, software and book reviews, blogging advice, and marketing tips” through her blog.

We’ve already chatted and I’m excited about her redesign … stay tuned for the unveiling in the next two weeks or so.

Daniel’s got Mark Goush of Weblog Tools Collection (an outstanding site for WordPress stuff) and EngTech facing off over at Daily Blog Tips today. One of the questions he asked them was: “What is more important, the content or the design?”

Mark’s answer was:

Both. Design and content are both responsible for bringing users back to your blog. A beautifully designed blog without any content is useless and vice versa

Engtech’s answer was:

Design can get attention, but only content will keep it.

My answer is … ditto!

Design is the packaging for content. And great packaging helps sell content. But in terms of priority, I think great content has to come first. Followed closely by an effecient, functional package or design.

As a designer, there are times I’ve had to make hard decisions … I’ve had to ditch design elements I cherished. But it had to be done.

Although I am a designer, I’m also a marketing person. If the design doesn’t do what you want it to do, then all you’ve done is create a nice piece of eye candy.

We call those things art galleries.

Here are six quick thoughts on what great design is:

• Great design showcases content.
• Great design doesn’t distract from content.
• Great design steers readers in the path you want them to follow.
• Great design is birthed from great strategy and objectives.
• Great design takes a tremendous amount of thought and time.
• Great design is often expensive, but worth every penny.

What do you think?

It’s been neat over the last year to watch my traffic on my various blogs … including the most trafficked blogs and how, as I have interlinked them, the traffic spills over to the others.

Of course, spillover traffic on each blog isn’t 100 percent … not even close. But there is a smaller, but healthy percentage that jump off to each blog.

The high traffic days are the ones I like to watch the spillover effect as the greater numbers are revealing … 1. of how well my links are placed … and 2. what people are actually interested in.

When I created my first blog, I naively thought I could translate all the momentum from that first blog to other niche blogs. But that of course isn’t always the case.

I wonder though about huge blogs like TechCrunch … and how they create, and with what results, spillover success to their other newer sister blogs, like CrunchNotes or MobileCrunch.

One observation I’ve made through my spillover efforts is that you can rally some momentum from existing, popular blogs … but the key is … producing consistent, great, niche content for a targeted audience.

The power is in the content!

The blog that started it all — Church Communications Prp — just got a much needed facelift that more accurately reflects my design “flair.”

Here are some of the features I built into this new blog design:

• Clean, fresh look
• Focus on content and blog posts
• Tabbed top menu navigation
• Cross browser compatability
• A linkblog in the sidebar — called Sidenotes — for really short posts on the left side using a category

By the way, I’m also planning on releasing a dumbed down version of the design as a free WordPress theme in the near future.

Brian tagged me … and he’s one of my best friends online and has been an incredible influence and encouragement to me as a blog designer … so here’s answers to the questions floating around about designing success as a designer.

I’m going to answer these questions strictly with my blog designer hat on … and most specifically, a WordPress blog designer.

1. How did you get started in the business?

I love blogging with WordPress and started talking with an excellent blog designer about how to do it myself.

2. What kept you going in those early years?

As bad as this is going to sound … money. And the dream of buying a house.

That really sounds materialistic … but the longer version of that answer would take a while. It’s not all about money. But the money I’ve made doing custom blog design has been an incredible blessing in my family’s life. And we are faithful to give back a portion to the One who gave it to us to manage.

3a. Did you ever feel like you weren’t good enough or you would never make it in this industry?

Of course.

3b. How did you work through that?

Personally, I don’t think I will ever get over it.

4. Do you look at others today and think “Wow, I wish I were that good”?

Ah, yeeeaaaahhh.

5. How do you measure success?

Just responding only in reference to success as a blog designer here … 1. making some great design friends (ref. Nathan, Brian, Nathan P, Ryan) … 2. doing great work that people love, use and feel good about … 3. seeing friends do really well and helping them launch their own design businesses (ref. no. 1) … 4. making an impact in other people’s lives (yeah, this sounds odd probably being here … but this has to do with my faith and being able to live out my faith in my design biz as best I can — although very imperfectly) … and 5. absolutely enjoying myself in the process!

Design Meltdown lists the 10 most popular blogs and gives their color schemes.

Also, if you’re looking for some color ideas, check out ELogoDesign’s Complete Color Matching Guide.