Unchecking 'Site name' removes color from header?

I'm looking at page.tpl.php, specifically, the header section. There is a div with id="header-title" and inside is where the site name is displayed. If one goes to the theme settings and unchecks the box for displaying the site name, the background color for the header disappears and defaults to the body's background color which is white. I've tried to wrap that stuff in an 'if' statement, checking to see if $site_name isset, but that didn't help.

Any ideas what is going on? I'm using the default color scheme by the way.