Your business’ blog is a staple for driving new users to your website who seek knowledge and answers to the questions they have.
It’s full of expert content marketing that’s valuable to your audience, which ultimately helps drive visitors to grow your business.
In fact, marketers who prioritize blogging efforts are 13 times more likely to see positive ROI, according to HubSpot.
While the content on your blog is a crucial part of making sure you’re generating traffic to it, content alone will not ensure your blog is making the best impression.
To help shape and optimize the readability of your content you need it to be facilitated by a blog design that’s able to draw customers into headlines, entice interactions, optimize for conversions, and create a lasting impression.
But where do you start? How do you organize everything to increase your blog’s subscribers while also keeping it aesthetically pleasing?
Before starting off, if you don’t know what is a blog? then click the link below to see:
https://howtodiscuss.com/t/blog/9769
To help you move on, we have gathered the important design components together that are best and by following them you can create amazing blogs and get yourself going
Blog Layout Best Practices To Follow
1. Organize Your Content Into A Learning Center
If you’re like IMPACT and have been creating content for years, chances are you’ve accumulated a lot of content of many different types.
Naturally, you’ve probably done what many other organizations have done and separated the content into a variety of different areas. For example, videos live in a video library, articles on a blog, whitepapers, and ebooks in a resource center — you get the idea.
While this organizes everything nicely from a content type standpoint, your user isn’t always going to want to view only the video or only the blog content.
Pretend the user is you, and you are on a journey to discover more about a particular topic.
Would you rather jump around different parts of the site to see what’s available for that topic, or, would you want you to have one location where you can view everything on that topic, be it blog, video, pillar, or downloadable content?
Aside from ease, this approach makes it more likely your user will spend more time on your site since the barrier of finding what they want has been decreased significantly. This will also likely result in an increase in your pages per session, too.
2. Narrow Your Grid For Your Blog Content
One of the easiest places to start achieving a clean and organized design is by utilizing a grid system —a technique that’s been used widely throughout print layouts in newspapers and magazines.
This technique has been applied to web design to help provide a consistent experience for users across a variety of screen sizes.
Imagine you have a printed 8.5 by 11inch paper with a typed essay in front of you. At its current state, it’s fairly easy to read. But what would happen if you stretched the paper to 18inches wide?
It becomes significantly more challenging to go from line to line reading. This is why you see newspapers and magazines employ more narrow column formats.
This idea is also the same for blogs. If your blog’s grid width is too large (especially if users are on larger screens) will create readability trouble for your users.
It risks them losing their place as they read line to line, while also making your content appear shorter and awkwardly spaced.
Since the vast majority of users are using monitors that are 1200px - 1300px wide (laptop size), your blog’s grid width should range from 900px - 1100px, with 1024px being the ideal.
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3. Use A Blog Card Layout
Many of us are putting out a lot of content. Depending on whether you’re blogging once a week or twice a day, you could already have up to 600+ blog posts on your website at the end of a year.
With that many posts, how do you best use your website’s real estate to organize those articles so you can display the most at once without hitting visitors with information overload?
One of the most UX-friendly layouts to solve for this is card-based design.
As we know, physical cards (baseball/basketball, Pokemon, historical) have been around for quite some time and serve as easy ways to visually display and organize information.
The architecture of cards has helped us easily recognize, recall, and read the information that’s important.
Using different images and font sizes to represent the most important to the least important elements of the card will make them more legible for those reading them.
Also, make sure to focus on incorporating these elements into the card (the bold are essential):
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Featured image
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Blog title
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Blog author (and image, if there’s room)
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Blog excerpt
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Post date
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Category
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Social share links
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Read More button
4. Choose Large, Beautiful Featured Images
One of the current trends across many blogs is incorporating large, non-stocky hero images for each blog card and inner blog post.
Feel free to play around with your layout. While many big companies choose to go full width on their images and keep their images contained to the grid, which allows them to see the content peeking into the fold.
5. Utilize Legible Typography Across All Devices
Let us set the record straight —
Not all people coming to your website have 20/20 vision, and those who do still don’t want to read your 12pt font. Just because the smaller font shortens everything up doesn’t necessarily make your readers want to keep reading.
You can’t count how many times your parents and friends arrive on blog articles only to find themselves zooming in just to read what’s on the page.
Sounds pretty ridiculous, right?
You want your website’s font sizes, especially on your blog, to be the last thing users are complaining about.
So then comes the question — what font sizes should I be using?
When it comes to body font, my experience leads me to say somewhere in between 17px - 21px, depending on what font you are using (some are naturally larger than others).
6. Include Article Quick-Summary Boxes
In an effort to rank well for competitive keywords and drive traffic to your site, most of the articles we write that could be answered in a sentence or two end up as a 1500 word post.
While writing content to that length is exactly what Google wants you to do, it’s not entirely intuitive to users who are looking for quick answers to things.
For example, think of the query ‘what is content marketing.’
Most of the search results associated with this kind of keyphrase are comprehensive guides, giving you everything you would want to know about the topic.
But if you’re someone just looking for the definition of content marketing, skimming a 4000-word article to find it might be a little tedious. This is where short summary boxes are really handy.
7. Use Short Descriptive Subheadings
Speaking of looking for quick answers to questions…
Another important characteristic you should practice is writing short, clear headers to section off your article into pieces that make it easy for your readers to consume.
Typically, people are coming to these articles with the intent of skimming them until they find the section(s) that answers their questions.
With that in mind, you need to make sure you have clear headers to section off your article so readers can accomplish this. I’m not talking about ‘Section 1’, or generic ones like ‘why’ and ‘how.’
You need headers that define exactly what readers will learn about in those grouped paragraphs of your article.
If you feel you can’t even do that with your blog articles, I suggest checking out some writing tips here to help get you organized.
You need to be writing subheadings that add quality to your writing and help make your article engaging for your visitors, especially those visiting for the first time.
8. Make Social Sharing Accessible On All Devices
Most blogs these days use social sharing to allow users to easily share blog articles. But, many sites aren’t granting that same experience for tablet and mobile users.
A Pew survey found that 85% of U.S. adults now get their news on a mobile device at least some of the time, including those over the age of 65.
Those same people are also browsing social platforms on their mobile devices, so you can bet they are willing to share content on mobile too (so long as they find it knowledgeable and have an easy means to do so).
But where should you be placing your social buttons? With limited space on smaller devices, many just don’t know where to put them.
9. Strategically Place Your Lead Magnets
Many of us find ourselves with a healthy amount of traffic but struggle to get the number of subscribers or conversions that we want. This is where utilizing an enticing and aesthetically pleasing lead magnet can be very desirable.
If you’re unfamiliar with the term, a lead magnet is an irresistible offer that users can receive in exchange for specific contact information.
Ideally, you want the lead magnet to be something that resonates with your target audience so you’re attracting qualified leads into your system.
While many people use the lead magnet as a stand-alone offer throughout the blog, more strategically use it as an offer that’s received when people subscribe to your blog.
This way you’re not only increasing your subscriber count but your conversions as well!
Once you figure out what offer works best for your audience, you now need to make it visually convincing.
10. Highlight Your Authors
Your authors put a lot of time and effort into creating the content for your blog, and you should celebrate that by posting them as the author of their respective articles.
Not only that, but you should also give them short bios that appear at the bottom of articles so your users are able to distinguish who’s written what on your blog. Better yet, have individual author pages that showcase all the posts they’ve written.
This helps the UX of your blog so users have an easier time searching for articles by authors they like, while also giving your authors a place to showcase all the insights they’ve provided on various subjects.