Most of these assets lived squarely in marketing’s owned-and-operated channels. But sometime over the past decade, “content” stopped fitting neatly inside the marketing department. It has now spilled into every corner of the customer experience: product UI copy, customer support scripts, help-center articles, checkout flows, push notifications, and content to live on whatever buzzy new platform will inevitably debut next quarter.

The rise of AI Search represents another turning point. LLM and AI Search experiences often pull from authoritative and widely corroborated sources; brands with consistent, high-quality coverage tend to be cited more. It stands to reason that the more unified a message your brand delivers across every element of the digital ecosystem, the more likely it is that message will make it into AI-generated outputs.

As a result of all of the above, we’re seeing content career opportunities evolve. More and more companies are hiring roles like “Head of Content Experience” and “Director of Content Design,” marking a shift in how organizations think about the choreography of brand storytelling across multiple channels. In the past, marketing teams focused on what to say and where to publish it — landing pages, campaign assets, maybe a few gated PDFs. Today, the mandate is more ambitious: Design the entire content journey so that every touchpoint feels frictionless.

Why Content Experience Matters

With so many platforms and content formats competing for customer attention, brands face a real consistency challenge. People want to feel like the same company that reeled them in during a short-form video ad is also the one answering their questions clearly in a help article or walking them through a checkout process.

While a cohesive brand voice isn’t necessarily a silver bullet for sales, it can make your brand feel more professional and trustworthy. Salesforce research has found that 69% of customers expect consistent interactions across departments. At the same time, trust in corporations is reaching all-time lows; nearly three-quarters (72%) of consumers trust brands less than they did a year ago. 

In this climate, inconsistency can further chip away at confidence. Content experience is one of the levers brands can pull to counteract that.

Content Experience, Design, and Strategy: How Are They Different, and Where Do They Overlap?

Unlike content marketing, which often treats messaging as standalone assets, content experience treats content as infrastructure. It involves building the scaffolding that makes every interaction feel connected, from first click to task completion.

Here’s how the different roles tend to break down:

• Content Strategist: Sets the big-picture plan for what content to create, for whom, and why. They define voice/tone guidelines, editorial calendars, governance rules, and KPIs. A strategist might determine that the brand needs a library of onboarding tutorials, but they aren’t usually the ones crafting the microcopy inside the product.
• Content Designer: Works closely with UX and product teams to shape in-product copy and flows. They focus on clarity, accessibility, and task completion, writing for things like error messages, navigation labels, onboarding prompts, and help center articles — typically in the context of the interface.
• Content Experience Lead: Operates between strategy and design, with a systems lens. They ensure that content is consistent, discoverable, and adaptive across channels. This can include building modular content systems, implementing personalization logic, managing taxonomies, and coordinating delivery across web, app, email, and emerging platforms.

Unlike with traditional content marketing roles, content design and experience are not so much about producing more assets, but orchestrating existing ones into a coherent, user-friendly whole. The goal is to make sure that no matter where a customer encounters your brand — in an AI Search snippet, a push notification, or a complex product workflow — it feels like part of the same conversation.

These roles aren’t meant to work in silos; their real value shows when they collaborate across the full content lifecycle. A content strategist might partner with a content experience lead to ensure the high-level editorial vision translates into modular, reusable components that can live across multiple platforms. 

That same experience lead might work side by side with content designers to embed those components into product flows and ensure they’re consistent with voice, tone, and accessibility standards. In mature teams, these roles often sit in a shared content or UX organization, but they also act as liaisons to marketing, product, and customer support. The collaboration is cyclical: Strategy informs experience, experience informs design, and design feedback helps refine strategy.

Applying the Mindset Without a Dedicated Hire

You don’t need a Head of Content Experience to start thinking like one. Even without a specialized team, small shifts can move your organization toward a more cohesive, user-first content experience.

Here’s a quick-start playbook:

1. Audit your most important journeys

Map your top user tasks — whether that’s signing up for a trial, upgrading a plan, or finding help — across your site, docs, product UI, and support channels. Look for language gaps, redundant steps, or tonal mismatches that create friction or confusion.

2. Treat content as a design component

Work with your design system or dev team to bake voice, tone, terminology, and content patterns into the same place you keep visual components. If those standards live in your CMS and design files, they’re easier to apply consistently.

3. Create space for cross-functional reviews

Bring marketing, UX, and product teams into the same (virtual) room to critique real user flows. A quick “ad → landing page → trial → help doc” run-through can surface tone shifts and clarity issues that siloed reviews miss.

4. Pilot fixes in high-impact areas

You don’t have to revamp everything at once. Try a small, visible project like:

• • Launching a unified glossary so marketing, product, and support all use the same terms.
  • Applying progressive disclosure in onboarding copy to reduce overwhelm and speed up activation.

5. Give teams a cheat sheet

A single-page “language patterns” guide covering voice, tone, and terminology gives everyone a quick reference. When in doubt, they’ll have a shared source of truth.

While there’s a lot up in the air right now about the future of content (and the careers in this space), there’s one consistency we can count on: New channels will keep emerging. AI will keep reshaping how people discover and evaluate brands. The best way to future-proof your message is to make sure it already works everywhere — and that’s exactly what content experience thinking delivers.

At Contently, we help brands put these principles into practice, from developing voice and tone guides to creating modular, multi-channel content systems that keep messaging consistent everywhere your audience meets you. Learn more about our services, including our AI Studio, here.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs):

1. Do I need to hire all three roles — content strategist, content designer, and content experience lead?

Not necessarily. Many companies start by layering content experience thinking into existing roles. If you can’t staff all three, focus on cross-functional collaboration between marketing, UX, and product, and look for people who can work across silos.

2. How is “content experience” different from just good UX writing?

UX writing focuses on the clarity and usefulness of in-product copy. Content experience zooms out to orchestrate how all content — in product, marketing, and support — works together, so it feels like one cohesive brand conversation.

3. What’s the first step if my organization isn’t ready for a full content design or experience hire?

Start with an audit of your most important customer journeys and create a shared “language patterns” guide for all teams. Even small steps toward consistency can pay off quickly in trust, usability, and discoverability.

The post Strategy, Experience, Design: The Roles Redefining Content in 2025 appeared first on Contently.

But brand marketers, are still largely producing content for audiences glued to their computer screens, when in reality, those audiences are just as (if not more) likely to be reading and viewing content on train commutes to work, during work-outs at the gym, and as a brain-break during boring meetings. From a user engagement standpoint, chunks of text just don’t cut it.

Understand Audiences in Context

“Mobile experiences are often a series of micro interactions – quick tasks that the user performs, often in a highly distracting, public environment using a very small screen,” explains Laura Klein, a UX design and research expert who specializes in helping lean startups build customer-friendly products.

From a functional standpoint, Klein explains, mobile-optimized content needs to be instantly attention-grabbing, clean, focused, and free from distractions. That means incorporating meaningful headings and sub-headings while keeping messaging short and to the point.

“A good mobile experience keeps important tasks quick, obvious, interruptible, and performable with a limited about of input,” emphasizes Klein.

Don’t Expect Lengthy Debates

Commenting and social media are invaluable for brand-to-consumer relationships, but marketers shouldn’t expect mobile users to engage in long, complicated conversations.

“Think about the difference between having a keyboard and mouse and the time to carefully craft a response to an email,” says Klein. “Now think about responding to a text on your way from one meeting to another.”

As Klein points out, mobile communication should be held to a different standard. It’s about communicating as much information — but not too much — as quickly as possible.

“Mobile communication is generally a series of short, asynchronous messages,” she says.

It’s pioneering new terrain in human-to-human relationships.

“Front-facing cameras, easy photos sharing, and group messaging apps are creating opportunities for all sorts of new types of communication that can actually be easier and richer than on computers,” explains Klein.

Cookie Cutters Won’t Work

Mobile users are all unique in their needs, values, and intents. Apps and mobile-optimized sites are not necessarily one-size-fits-all solutions for your audience’s content needs. Marketers need to dig deep into understanding their audience to best articulate their content-to-market fit.

“The best thing you can do is learn why your users are mobile,” recommends Klein. “Do they not have computers? Is their job on the road? Are they in meetings or classes? What sort of mobile devices are they using? Tablet usage can be much closer to laptop than it is to phone, for example.”

Content marketers need to make user research a priority so that they can produce the most valuable content possiblelooking beyond the device to focus on the needs of the person behind the screen.

“By learning some basic user research techniques, you can increase your value immensely because you’ll no longer just be ‘building for mobile,’ you’ll be building for your user,” says Klein. “And understanding how to build for your user is the best skill you can have, hands down.”

Prioritize Design

Design brings a mobile content strategy together. A cluttered look and feel doesn’t help anybody. Even though mobile traffic makes up 10% of global Internet traffic, the majority of businesses’ sites aren’t optimized for smartphone and tablet screens, says Lauren Indvik in Mashable. Particularly for longer-form content, this is a massive turn-off for consumers.

With so many trends, it can be difficult to identify the ‘right’ mobile look and feel.

Klein encourages marketers to stick to the basics.

“Try not to get caught up in trends and debates like ‘mobile first’ or ‘flat design vs. skeumorphism.’ These are distractions,” she says. “Understand your your users’ problems and needs and build things that make their lives better.”

The post Bringing Content Down to Size For Mobile Audiences appeared first on Contently.

But nowhere in this Wikipedia entry does it say anything about Jägermeister having anything to do with the state of New Jersey. And this confused me, because all over the internet today people have been distributing an image created by men’s lifestyle brand Thrillist, called “Red, White, and Booze: Mapping All 50 States’ Most Iconic Beer/Hooch,” a U.S. map in which each state is replaced by the logo of that state’s most famous beer or liquor brand.

Thrillist’s “Red, White, and Booze” map.

For Kentucky, it’s Jim Beam; for California, it’s Sierra Nevada; and for New Jersey, a state where I lived for 15 years, it’s Jägermeister. Which I simply did not understand. According to the aforementioned delightful Wikipedia entry, Jägermeister indeed has no connection to the state of New Jersey, and, per the responses to a cranky Twitter post that I shot out into the digital ether, its only connection to the state is a frequent name-dropping by the guidos of reality show “Jersey Shore.”

(Worse, a true Jersey liquor success story — Laird & Co., the oldest licensed distillery in the country and the makers of Laird’s famed applejack — was attributed on the map to Virginia. Virginia.)

But I digress. The point is, my indignation over this map caused me to share it on Twitter. And comment on the original map. And that’s exactly what Thrillist, a company that’s shown continual savviness over the years with regard to brand-generated content that people will actually share, was hoping would happen.

The secret sauce (secret whiskey?) here is that there is just about no kind of content that will spur people to share it online more than content that somehow generalizes them. If they like it, they’ll shout out in solidarity (“Hell, yeah! Allagash!”) but they’re even more likely to share and comment and keep perpetuating the content if they’re dissatisfied. They’re compelled to talk about themselves, prove their own authority, and get into a verbal sparring match that makes them feel like they’re part of something that’s worth representing.

“Red, White, and Booze” is the latest in a series of U.S. map graphics that have been increasingly popping up on the likes of BuzzFeed, Tumblr, Reddit, and other hubs of easily digestible, easily shareable content. Thrillist is one of the first times it’s been turned into a brand play rather than something purely editorial (e.g. accompanying a bigger magazine article), or the domain of a lone Tumblr user with a copy of Photoshop and some time to kill. But it certainly won’t be the last; these maps of logos, facts, and random stereotypes are quick to gain the digital momentum that brands crave, even as the idea of an “infographic” threatens to become so overexposed that it elicits eyerolls instead of clicks.

these maps of logos, facts, and random stereotypes are quick to gain the digital momentum that brands crave

“Red, White, and Booze,” for one, now has over 5,000 ‘likes’ on Facebook and nearly 200 comments at the time of this writing, barely 24 hours since it was originally posted. Why? Because there are few things more American than bickering over our minor but oh-so-crucial regional differences. And these maps are the equivalent of waving a carrot in front of a horse, or perhaps a better analogy would be waving a Yankees pennant around in a bar full of Red Sox fans.

Thrillist says “Red, White, and Booze” was inspired by a recent map created by artist Steve Lovelace, called “The Corporate States of America,” which fills in each state with the logo of what Lovelace deems to be its most iconic brand (Lovelace’s blog post has over 250 comments). GOOD magazine polled its readers for a similar map to determine the best beer brewed in each state, which was particularly amusing because no respondents could seem to think of a good beer brewed in Idaho. And a Reddit user generated heated online arguments with a map that claimed to select the most iconic movie that takes place in or represents each state (“Fast Times At Ridgemont High” beating out a dozen lovely midcentury Hollywood-themed noirs to take the California title? Really? Oh, wait, it’s Reddit.)

Even when it’s disseminating factual content rather than the opinion of the creator, presenting content in this kind of state-by-state graphical breakdown still catalyzes quips, debate, criticism, and shareability — Deadspin used it to map the highest-paid state employees, who are typically football or basketball coaches with a few oddball exceptions (in Nevada, it’s a plastic surgeon employed by UNLV’s med school, of course), and racked up over 500 comments. Psychology Today magazine, not exactly a top name when it comes to viral content, created a widely shared state-by-state map of the most common places for Craigslist’s “missed connections” ads to be posted — it’s mostly “bar,” “supermarket,” or “Walmart,” but in New York it’s “subway,” in California it’s “24 Hour Fitness,” and in Indiana it’s “at home,” making you wonder just what kind of habit Hoosiers have of peeking into each others’ windows.

The reason why the “state map” phenomenon works so well in terms of viral potential is that while it’s rooted in stereotyping one state from the next, it’s generally inoffensive. It’s tapping into the same kind of heated but ultimately friendly rivalries that happen between sports teams, universities, and Star Wars vs. Star Trek fans — there are rarely ugly implications of racial, ethnic, or political stereotypes.

The content can’t be outright wrong, but it can (and should) be controversial. That’s easy because state lines are regularly silly and arbitrary — consider just how little in common Miami has with Pensacola, that northern and southern Virginia are worlds apart, or how many Austin residents feel the need to tell out-of-staters that their city is totally different from the rest of Texas — but our home states are on our driver’s licenses and our income tax returns, and we often, light-heartedly, have to own up to both their best and worst qualities.

It’s tapping into the same kind of heated but ultimately friendly rivalries that happen between sports teams, universities, and Star Wars vs. Star Trek fans — there are rarely ugly implications of racial, ethnic, or political stereotypes.

Few things hit the mark better in terms of content that people will not just share, but keep on sharing: They don’t just think it’s attractive, or informative, but it’s something on which they want to comment, and they want to be heard. It’s not as simple as that for every brand — for Thrillist, booze and neo-Americana are incredibly on-brand, so they have it pretty easy. But it’s a reminder of just how simple the basics are behind internet sharing successes that people (and advertisers) tend to overthink by several orders of magnitude.

And, on a related note, it’s probably about the right time for meme-hungry brands to jump on the “map graphic” craze sooner rather than later, before it’s as out-of-steam as those “Keep Calm & Carry On” variations.

Or Grumpy Cat knockoffs. Please, make those go away.

The post Booze + Arguments = America (= Shareability) appeared first on Contently.

By now you might have gotten lost in, glanced at, or at least heard people talking about the New York Times’ Pulitzer Prize-winning long-form multimedia report “Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek,” launched last November, which used open-source web technologies (custom HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, primarily) to tell a richly layered, jaw-dropping story of man versus nature. The Times’ team opened up to the web community about how it was made, and others have gone on to study its inner workings even further. More recently you might have also noticed a recent post on Medium in which Cody Brown, co-founder of developer tool Scroll Kit, claimed to have replicated the Times’ laborious efforts in a fraction of the time. He demonstrated this in a video that he then removed from YouTube after the Times’ legal department threatened him with a cease-and-desist. Is the Times being a big bully against a small developer or is it justified in protecting its work?

We’re content strategists here, not lawyers, but it’s reasonable to assume that Scroll Kit had used the Times’ content for commercial purposes without permission, which is a violation of the Times’ terms of service. And since Scroll Kit would hope to profit from its demo, that would not be considered fair use. Clearly, instigating a beef with the Times has earned Scroll Kit some attention. What’s less obvious is what hope it offers publishers drawn in by the prospect of dazzling readers with their own record-breaking, buzz-worthy visual content presentations. And questions of where inspiration ends and imitation (or theft) begins are not necessarily cut and dry.

While the Times did set the bar Cascade Mountain–high for jaw-dropping visual narrative content, the media company cannot claim to own just any immersive online storytelling experience that integrates parallax scrolling, 100-percent-width photography, embedded video, slideshows, and interactive data visualizations. The Times can’t even prevent other two-syllable natural disaster stories, as the Guardian’s equally gripping “Firestorm” proves (or other snowy tales of peril, in the case of Outside’s “Lost On Everest”). An idea cannot be copyrighted, but an expression of an idea can. The Times could claim that “Snow Fall” is a unique expression that contains protected content and make the case that its design and code are part of that collective work.

Brown, who studied filmmaking at New York University (and whose Twitter bio states the mission “Trying to make the internets more cinematic”), has said that his goal was not to rip off the New York Times, but to show that article pages can be customized by non-programmers and can achieve similar functionality to what they see in “Snow Fall.” As Brown writes via email, “We’ve created a visual editor that gives you a high level of control over an individual page. The pages you design are then able to be easily integrated into a preexisting site.” When asked how much programming knowledge a Scroll Kit user would need, he replies: “[Zero.] And that’s the point. Engineers are often so much more expensive to hire than designers.”

Not all storytelling is equal.

If “Snow Fall” looks expensive, that’s because it is. Just as the written and visual elements were created by an exceptional team of journalists, an ace team of designers and developers made all those pieces work beautifully together. Results of this kind do not (and should not) come cheap. Brown shared a couple of links to pages developed with Scroll Kit, including a cover story spec for TIME and a Valentine’s Day feature for Thought Catalog, and it’s clear that Scroll Kit is a work in progress. The quality gap at the moment is pretty wide between pages that have been built in Scroll Kit and what the Times has done, so it’s probably unfair to compare them. While both are examples of dynamic web pages that use JavaScript to surprise readers as they scroll, the comparison ends there. The truth is, if someone were to take and use the same code as “Snow Fall” with new assets, it wouldn’t automatically have the same effect. All the choices that go into those surprises for readers — deciding how and in what way each interaction should unfold — are the result of talent and testing.

The conversation would be different had Brown used a client’s or his own content to tell his product story using the Scroll Kit platform (we can hope that’s coming soon). His intention — that the tools for crafting better digital stories should be in the hands of more people — is ultimately good. And he’s not alone: Marquee is another new company working toward a similar end (see the recently relaunched Narratively built on its platform). But just as having access to a video camera won’t instantly make someone a great filmmaker, it will still be up to each storyteller to master their application of these tools. So if learning HTML, CSS, and JavaScript is unfeasible and hiring a programmer too far out of reach, then there’s little risk in trying what these companies can offer.

Whatever you make, though, please don’t call it “Snow Fall.”

The post The Firestorm After the “Snow Fall” appeared first on Contently.

Users who are able to capture truly stunning photos with the app can also develop a following of complete strangers. The same opportunity is available for brands, and one business owner, Sam Maher, says brands that aren’t on Instagram now are making a huge mistake.

Maher runs Fluent City, a language school in New York, and has found that the most popular content isn’t always a direct representation of his brand — a picture of a cupcake does as well or better than something about language education.

On his own, Maher follows the colorful streetwear community and a couple in Memphis (her and him), which he calls his Instagram reality show, since they’ve developed a following simply by being charming people.

Some other hits are NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, which uses Instagram to share the most fascinating images from science, and educate followers at the same time.

The official account from HBO’s Girls is almost an ongoing scrapbook of the show, with memorable quotes superimposed on screenshots from each episode

Maher himself is a success story for brands like WestNYC, which he discovered by searching hashtags on Instagram and was in the store days later due of the brand’s great content.

Streetwear is a natural fit for Instagram’s visual interface, since personal accounts from industry personalities such as Dennis Todisco can double as the “what’s new” section of the clothing brand’s website — he’s simply out doing cool stuff and wearing the label’s latest attire.

Some brands take a step further and use Instagram to involve followers in the product, effectively enabling these devoted followers with influence.

NPR posted a note to its followers after the acquisition of Instagram, asking them to email a voice memo with their reactions — and used the voice memos on the air, said Andy Carvin, who manages the account along with a few others.

Burberry runs a series called “Art of the Trench,” which asked users to post street photos of trench coats with the hashtag #artofthetrench, essentially a celebration of the style for which Burberry is so well known.

Instagram may be one of the few places left on the internet where value is in being interesting, not loud, or posting at the ideal hour. Most of these popular acccounts only post a few times each week.

Even after its purchase by Facebook, Instagram continues to be the untainted network — no ads, and a single stream that does not allow for noise or clutter. That means that when a brand garners a spot on a user’s stream, it also earns full attention, and it is up to the brand to make that worthwhile.

The post Instagram Lets Brands Get Personal with Followers appeared first on Contently.

But with a little creativity and imagination, marketers can captivate subscribers and convince them not to click the dreaded unsubscribe link.

Email marketing shouldn’t just contain text. It’s been proven over and over again that on the internet, images stand out to readers more than text does. This is true in emails, on blogs, and alongside updates on social media sites. There is no question — images work when it comes to getting the reader interested.

Jetsetter, a travel promoter, is a good example of a company that takes advantage of the pictorial opportunities in its industry. It sends out beautiful photos of destination locations to subscribers in its newsletters, writes HubSpot Blog‘s Corey Eridon.

“When you have breathtaking photography like you see in their emails, why would you lean on copywriting to tell your story?” Eridon writes. “A very simple photographic lineup of the vacation destinations being featured is all that’s needed to get email click-throughs and site conversions.”

Eridon also points to UrbanDaddy, an upscale online magazine, as a company that does email marketing right. Its email headers always contain graphically glamorous shots, getting the reader interested from the get-go.

Drawing from its site layout, Pinterest makes the cut for producing brilliant newsletters, says Eridon. Since the site itself is already visually appealing, the company decided to make the newsletter almost identical.

What all these companies have in common is that they put out clean, slick looking newsletters, full of imagery that compels the reader to stay subscribed. When 77 percent of American consumers don’t want to give out their emails, marketers have to work hard to keep them satisfied.

The post Photos Get Results in Email Newsletters appeared first on Contently.

For marketers and bloggers, interesting and arresting photos dress up an otherwise bland post and attract the desired attention.

On sites with photos, page views are 94 percent higher than those that only contain text. On Facebook, posts that have photos are 120 to 180 percent more engaging than those without them. It’s clear from the statistics that users crave visuals.

“In a landscape where everyday marks a cutthroat battle for attention, images are becoming as essential as text to professional bloggers, web publishers and businesses alike,” writes Shutterstock’s Adam Singer in his post, “Why Images Are Vital to Modern Blogs.”

Singer says that text is “easily glossed over” because people are scanning the Internet quicker than ever. However, photos can slow people down, because “strong imagery is something that can’t be ignored.” He also points out that if a brand uses the same imagery styles repeatedly, the viewer will begin to associate the photos with the brand.

Premium content usually contains images.

“Unconsciously, we elevate the worth of a site that has images mixed in with stories,” Singer says. “Of course, a site with great content can stand on its own, but when coupled with images, it creates a synergy, encouraging shares, Tweets and Stumbles.”

Photos are mood setters and can assist with the storytelling process on a blog post.

When it comes to personalization on a blog, photos also come in handy, Content Marketing Institute‘s Jodi Harris told The Content Strategist.

“Any image, really, can enhance an article because it helps to humanize the concepts being talked about,” she said. “It helps an article become more than just nameless, faceless, chatter — it helps readers view the author’s insight as a relatable, personal experience.”

Picking any old image isn’t going to be effective.

“If it’s a unique, intriguing, or personalized image, it can definitely make the content more share-worthy,” Harris says. “Generic clip-art or abstract art, maybe not so much, though.”

Photos command attention, and for marketers  and publishers that means dollars. Images drive value. In March, Facebook bought Instagram for $1 billion and Pinterest is one of the fastest growing social media sites of all time.

“Any content —  print, online, mobile, or what have you — looks more professional and authoritative if there are relevant images included,” Harris says. “While an article or two might be fine without an image, an entire collection of content would seem dry, dull and like a scientific journal if it had no images.”

Images courtesy of familymwr/flickr

The post Your Content Is Sunk Without Good Photos appeared first on Contently.

A study by Jamy Li and Mark Chignell of the University of Toronto reveals how readers are more attracted to authors they judge to be similar to themselves. The language you use and how it is delivered are your strongest cues to personality, but what if you want to attract an audience you don’t necessarily fit in?

As identity designer David Airey puts it, “Your website opens doors to contacts you’d never imagine you’d meet. Now more than ever, millions of people have access to your online presence, and whether you like it or not, they’ll immediately judge you upon your site design.”

To a designer, this states the obvious, but it is too easy for a blog to give a different impression than intended. Rather than striving to appeal to everyone, understanding the audience and fusing their point of view with a solid design aethetic is the best way to attract the right people and build that core readership.

Li and Chignell concluded that readers were able to judge an author’s personality with a high rate of accuracy, and were the most attracted to blogs they felt fit their own world views, ‘niche’ or cultural preferences. This is not all that surprising, really.

The Eye Makes Snap Judgements

The brain can make judgements almost as fast as visual information hits the back of the eye. In a study by Carleton University in Canada, viewers shown a variety of websites were able to rate the site’s visual appeal in under 50 milliseconds. This initial impression occurs before a single word is read, demonstrating just how – even on the internet – looks come before personality.

If your blog went to a party, how would it dress? What kind of people would be there?  What do they do for a living? Consider how these blogs at left translate.

Design Should Match Tone

Because your ideal reader shares a similar point of view, often your own perceptions are enough to drive this aspect of your blog’s design. Where you don’t want to go overboard is with imagery or graphics. Discerning web users prefer a minimal approach, if not necessarily in the overall design, in the way content is presented.

Color is Key

Color is typically the first thing about your website that affects viewer perception, and it does so on a subconscious level. There are many interpretations of color depending on a viewer’s cultural background, personal preferences and state of mind.

The Right Type of Type

Typography is another critical factor. At the Software Usability Research Lab at Wichita State University, common fonts were matched with various personality traits by participants. The study discovered that each font-face embodies prominent factors that affect how visitors attribute personality and voice to your content.

While employing design theory and balance to a design’s typography is important, the font you choose for your logo and presentation conveys the voice of your website as much as the content itself, and factors largely into your blog’s overall style.

If your blog can charm a viewer with an attractive design, one that immediately delivers ques as to the personality within, not only will they stay long enough to read what you have to say, they may overlook other factors such as functionality or ad quantity and approve of the content at a higher rate.

This is thanks to cognative bias. People want to be right in their judgements, therefore using a website that gave a favorable first impression “proves” they made a good decision. In terms of web design, this impression is based first on visual impact, second on content and third on other factors such as usability and credibility.

In the end, personality is about interpretation. People want to connect with someone familiar, influential, intriguing and relevant.

By determining what factors make up your own persona, you are better equipped to put the best face forward to your visitors to build stronger brand trust, subscription rates and social recognition.

Image Credits:

MadebyTim, Pelicanfly, Illustratorslounge, &  Colors of the Web by Colourlovers

The post What Would Your Blog Wear to a Party? appeared first on Contently.

WordPress has held the top spot among website publishing platforms for a long time, with nearly 73 million WordPress-powered sites worldwide.

Whether someone is a professional blogger, promoting a business or using WordPress to publish art and photography, presenting content in the best way possible shows they care about content.

The visual appeal and user experience offered by a website has an immediate and lasting impression on every reader.

What Makes a Theme Exceptional

A truly good WordPress theme goes beyond aesthetic perfection to offer solid core functionality and administrative features. There may be hundreds of WordPress themes, but they are not all equal. For blogging, a theme must consider the needs of both the reader and the publisher.

Below are a handful of critical elements to look for when evaluating themes to ensure they offer the absolute best functionality, are easy to customize and can stand the test of time.

• Flexible layouts or easy to customize templates
• Social network integration
• Clear, beautiful typography and custom fonts support
• Shortcodes or Post Formats for easy styling of post content
• WordPress image support
• Innovative ways of displaying visual content
• Clean, current and semantic code
• Customer service and support
• Mobile-friendly

Here are 10 WordPress themes that embody these elements, powering blogs from top to obscure . Visit each theme’s feature page for detailed information.

uDesign

Let’s start with uDesign, a theme earning over 14,000 sales on the popular Themeforest marketplace – and for good reason. It is the most versatile and comprehensive theme available, providing loads of value for a small price.

All the critical features are there, including custom widgets, social network links, SEO support, fonts, forms and image flexibility. Check out the showcase to see what is possible.

Price: $35

Canvas

WooThemes Canvas isn’t the prettiest theme out-of-the-box compared to other themes on this list, but that’s because it is a powerful framework focused on the foundation and functionality that make an excellent WordPress blog.

Like uDesign, Canvas includes several templates, shortcodes and layouts for creating many different blog styles such as magazines, photo blogs, portfolios or traditional journals.

As a framework, Canvas is a prime investment for designers specializing in blog design, as it features an extensive developer library, amazing support and child themes.

Price: $70 (you get two other Woo Themes free)

Knead

This theme from Obox has full support for photo and video blogging and comes with two color schemes, a typography manager, custom widgets and templates. It is extremely easy to customize and is fully responsive, which means it looks great on mobile devices.

Price: $60 (you get two more themes free – try mag.Press and Azione for more blogging options)

Evolution

Elegant Themes are known for their beautiful styling and solid code, and the incredible value offered through their themes club. They have several gorgeous blogging themes to choose from, but Evolution rises above them all by virtue of its clean layout and mobile-friendly responsiveness.

All Elegant Themes have several customization options, custom font support and SEO integration.

Price: $39 (gets you access to all themes and support for a year)

Endless

Endless is a clean and stylish infinite scrolling theme that is also responsive. The success of Pinterest has made this layout desirable and effective, perfect for storytellers and photo-bloggers.

The theme includes customizable graphics, font support, templates and social network integration.

Price: $35

New Horizon

New Horizon is another responsive Pinterest-style theme that uses a unique visual composer that allows you to customize the layout using drag and drop. It is loaded with shortcodes, widgets and social network features, and comes with a traditional blog layout, too.

Price: $35

WP Traveller

For photo-bloggers and travelling authors, this theme is unprecedented in terms of functionality and uniqueness. It uses Google maps and custom gallery templates to create an interactive journey through your content, while still providing the traditional features you expect from any theme.

It has full support for video, custom fonts and social networks along with four basic color schemes to start.

Price: $35

Memo

Designer Orman Clark is a darling of the industry, known for his impeccable code and simple theme designs. His most recent blogging theme, Memo, works with the WooTumblog plugin to produce a Tumblr-style layout that supports special post styles for video, images, quotes, and more.

The theme is SEO and social-powered, and primed to take any customization you want to throw at it.

Price: $40

Periodic

If you read a lot of blogs, you may actually recognize Periodic. This magazine-style theme doesn’t deviate too much from what we have seen magazine sites do in the past, but excels in the fine detail.

Best suited for large blogs, Periodic includes layout flexibility, custom category templates, social sharing, socially-powered comments, ad support and author footers.

Price: $35

TimesSquare

To round off the list, TimesSquare is a new, modern, visually-driven blogging theme with stunning photo and video treatments. The overall layout is very different from many other blogs and magazines, using subtle styling and usability features that make it delightful to use.

The back-end is comprehensive, straightforward and user-friendly.

Price: $35

The post Top 10 WordPress Themes for Pro Bloggers appeared first on Contently.

Images are necessary to make your blog posts easier to read and help to make your site look a little fancier. You know this from all the articles you’ve read on Contently telling you so.

Now that we convinced you, do you know where those images are coming from? You have two options: stock images or creating your own.

Mouth Media wrote a great post comparing the pros and cons of each and it boils down to two segments: either you are a business where time equals money or you want your creativity to flow free.

Which camp do you belong to?

You are a thriving business with little extra time

If your business lives by Amazon.com VP and CTO Werner Vogels’ philosophy that a business must focus on their core competency instead of infrastructure; if you are professional company that focuses on business-to-business sales, taxes, or finances; if throughout your busy day of running a business you try to make time to write blog posts since you know that a company blog is a good idea; or if you have a limited budget, time, but still have the desire to create images yourself, then you should use stock images on your blog.

Pros

• Fit tight budgets,
• available when you need them,
• great for visually referencing your editorial content

Cons

• Your competitors have access to those images as well,
• compromised creativity,
• stock photos are generic

You are a creative brand who needs to show individuality

If you know your way with a camera and have a talent for composition; if your business or personal brand is known for being creative and authentic and creating your own custom images makes it all the more clear; or if you also want to make your blog posts unique from everyone else, then you should let your creativity shine and create your own custom images for your blog.

Pros

• Brand consistency,
• exclusive use of content,
• transparency

Cons

• Requires time,
• requires money,
• requires talent

Or, you belong to a third, niche segment

If you know that some stock images are cheesy and full of cliches, however,  you have a creative idea that needs to be made into a project before someone else thinks of it; and if you know how to curate content and have an idea for which images will cause a chuckle, then you might be, or be like, Edith Zimmerman, writer for The Hairpin and creator of Women Laughing Alone with Salad.

In a perfect world, you would have a team of professional photographers at your disposal to create all the images you want. However, for many small businessed, using stock images is the only option.

Read Contently’s post on Best Practices For Using Stock Photos When Blogging and follow Creative Commons guidelines. Once you have the time and money, then invest in creating your own custom content.

Pictures help tell your company’s story, and you want all those thousands of words to be your own.

Images courtesy of kevin dooley/flickr, KarunaEM/shutterstock, shoofly Stock/flickr

The post The Great Blog Photo Dilemma: Stock or Custom? appeared first on Contently.

“Art direction is bigger and better than a trend — it’s a change,” designer Tim Smith says. “It will shift the way we view the web and it will alter the way we design for the web.”

The number of art directed blogs is increasing as brands and bloggers seek to maximize the power of words and images to captivate visitors, relate a story and communicate their message with skilled precision.

Art direction has propelled print publications for decades. The extent to which a magazine invests in creative design sets the tone for the content, both fundamentally and visually. This impressed upon readers how vogue, edgy or invested a particular publication was.

Today, blogs face the same challenges. Quality of content is a main factor in how well a blog is received, but blogs that delight readers visually offer a new experience that can leave a powerful impression.

“It’s a push in the right direction,” Smith says of the increasing care with which graphic artists and directors are attending to blogs and websites. “It makes us reconsider the way content should be displayed on the web.”

Digital Art Direction

Art directed blogs, or “blogazines,” give designers and writers the opportunity to showcase talent and creativity, while providing the discipline necessary for crafting an exceptional literary work. The format is decidedly purposeful, each post requiring a measure of forethought, time and diligence. In this way, art-directed blogs instill an air of anticipation for readers eagerly awaiting the next article.

An exceptional art-directed blog post is one that could barely be discerned from its print counterpart. Successful blogazines deliver consistency via a not-so-magic formula comprised of these simple elements:

Distinct Style

For designers like Trent Walton, art directed blogging is a medium for presenting thought and talent on one page. For writers, it is an escape from the rigid grid of traditional columns and square images. Brilliant art direction combines the distinct style of the publication’s brand and the article’s subject matter.

At one glance, a reader can understand the mood, topic and personality portrayed in the piece.

Typography

Type is the heart and soul of print, affording zero excuse for not carrying it over onto the screen. Art directed blogging goes one step beyond, choosing a nice and consistent typeface, and uses type for visual appeal, voice and emphasis.

 Jason Santa Maria, one of the first print designers to begin producing art-directed blog posts, uses typography almost exclusively to create his distinct style.

Illustration

Stunning magazine spreads feature illustrations that catch the eyes and moves them. Shapes, images and photos are used to support the text, create texture and tell the story as much as the words themselves. Blogazines strive to present visual content in a new an interesting way, using the full screen, layering with other elements or directing the reader towards key text.

Designer Gregory Wood‘s blog is a perfect example.

Minimalism

Like art directed print, art directed posts focus entirely on the content, finding new ways to integrate things like asides, comments and social sharing links. The space above the fold is almost always left clear of sidebars, links or other elements not having to do with the article, as as David Desandro demonstrates above.

The most prominent art-directed blogs use a minimal interface for navigation and personal branding, allowing the pages to speak for themselves.

Minimal doesn’t mean you must strip away all fun and functionality. There is still opportunity for integrating interactive content, as seen here on The Bold Italic.

Inspiration

A nudge in the right direction is never far away. The web is an endless source of visual stimulation, concepts and styles.

See these examples: Ammut Und Demut, The Bold Italic, Dustin Curtis, Travis Gertz, The Stray Muse, CraigMod, The Many Faces Of…, Tuhin Kumar, Scott Brown, Kota CepuPaddy,  Donnelly, Uekermann, Story Matters

The Web

Resources: Behance Magazine Spreads, Smashing Magazine: Creative Print Typography Layouts

Your Magazine Rack

Your grandmother’s attic or the local vintage book store contains ideas and art forms waiting to be resurrected and re-tuned for a new audience. The local magazine rack vies for your attention more than ever before, offering a bouquet of design instruction. Esquire, Rolling Stone, Interview, Coilhouse, Complex and PlanB are just a handful of gorgeous publications to search for.

Resources

Art directed content is not for the time constrained or faint of heart. It is a process of focused conceptualization, preparation and execution that begs specialized stylesheets, graphic design and typography for each and every piece.

Even so, deciding how elaborate the technical aspects is a personal choice. Art directed blogs are possible with as little as a custom background, font and image, or as much as custom CSS, layout experiments and post-specific features.

Here are some resources to help you get started:

AListApart: Art Direction & Design, NestaCMS: Making an Art Directed Blog, WordPress Art Direction plugin, PlusQuam Perfekt Art Direction Theme for WordPress

Print Image Credits: Breaking New Ground & Eyes on the Skies by Jeopopolis, Foo Fighters Layout by Tomas Ayala, Fixed & One layout by SAWDUST, Sareni Svijet –  PlanB Magazine, Croatia

The post Art Directed Blogs Capture the Mind’s Eye appeared first on Contently.

Most designers view web fonts as a delightful playground of decorative elements, and assume they will be reflected perfectly when the project is done and unleashed upon the world. After all, they painstakingly design a website and ensure it has adequate styling for all browsers, so why worry about the type? Far from friendly and controllable, web typography is an uncharted territory wherein designers have little influence.

Type has never before been used in such a variety of contexts and mediums. Font creators have to consider screen size, format and rendering engines. This new level of complexity makes it nearly impossible to create a perfect font that will look elegant and perform well under every scenario. Web designers and bloggers must contemplate user needs, behaviors and the voice of the content itself.

Here are five ways to put this understanding to use for better typography on your blog:

1. Leave the Personality to the Design

Choosing fonts that jive with the design of a blog is the first step most designers take, but conveying attitude and style should be left to the design elements. Rather than imposing design onto the blog’s content, or using a font  the client thinks is cool, simplify the process by choosing a general font style such as serif over sans-serif, and leave the actual typeface decision up to technical factors.

2. Size Matters

A purely visual approach to choosing a font size can also backfire. A well-intended 14 pixels may be readable on a desktop browser in a specific resolution as long as the user isn’t zoomed in, or has text sizes set at the browser or operating system level. Typekit‘s Tim Brown suggests using the golden mean, or any meaningful scale, to determine the right scale for your design’s type. Once that perfect number is determined, you are able to build your stylesheets using ems, ensuring both a beautiful heading hierarchy and elegant scaling to all resolutions.

3. Function Over Form

As tempting as it may be to use a modern-looking font like Tulpen One, its narrow and thin form makes it unreadable at small sizes – which can spell disaster for mobile screens and browsers that anti-alias the font’s thin lines into non-existence. Prototype your typeface selections using tools like Typekit’s Font Browser or Webfont Specimen and choose fonts for their sharpness, clarity and browser compatibility.

4. Compatibility and Accessibility Vary

Trajan Sans as rendered by IE8 (top) and Chrome 4 (bottom)

The viewer’s operating system and browser impact a font’s clarity, as does the original intent of the font’s design. A user’s ability to read your text also comes into play, and is the most obvious motivator for perfecting your blog typography.

CSS affords us some small relief from the issues various formats introduce. By the time a suitable typeface is chosen and implemented, styles can help us build structure, provide emphasis and enhance a blog’s personality through color. By providing enough contrast, line spacing and hierarchy, you ensure readers are able to form the best relationship with your content.

5. Consider Performance

When deviating from default fonts, including Arial, Verdana and Georgia, any typeface you choose has to be served up by some other means. The type of font file and its method of implementation are yet other factors in how the font will perform under certain circumstances. Weigh the pros and cons of @font-face against hosted solutions like Typekit or Google Web Fonts, and include fallbacks in your stylesheets to a browser-default font.

Typography Map image courtesy of Ursula Hitz

The post 5 Simple Steps to Better Blog Typography appeared first on Contently.

The only problem is this distinction doesn’t work, says Facebook’s Content Strategist Tiffani Jones Brown.

“You cannot make a division about the interface. The idea that only some content needs a system is wrong. It all fits within a design system,” said Brown.

There is a strong connection between content and design, says Andy Chung, a designer at Facebook. When he worked at Mozilla, one of their content interface strategies was to focus on reducing complex issues into simple statements.

Content strategy is about design; the two are interrelated, says ex-Boeing content developer Keith Robertson. (At Boeing, Robertson sometimes had to choose words based on pixel size.)

“Content strategy is process driven. There is workflow and audits. You need to ask ‘Who is the audience?’ and ‘What problems are you trying to solve?’,” says Robertson.

One good strategy is taking out half the content, Robertson continues. But content strategy also looks at the context to simplify it.

“If you have to do content on your own, make sure every word serves a purpose. This takes time to understand. But one exercise makes sure each content piece is very tight: See how they fit together,” explains Robertson.

Image courtesy of Flickr, Rdoke

The post Content Strategy vs. Interface Design appeared first on Contently.

Clients want lots of traffic to their sites and social media helps that to happen. Providing punters with easy ways to share content encourages that process – but it can also compromise the look and feel of a site.

The answer? Take control. Forget off-the-shelf icons, design your own buttons and integrate them thoughtfully and carefully. Here’s how.

Select the Best

You don’t need a link to every single social media service online – just the ones with highest traffic referrals. Compact and bijou design is key.

The strategy will vary from site to site, but Twitter and Facebook are the must-haves. To cater to bloggers, you can add WordPress, Blogger and Tumblr to the list. If you’re down with early adopters, think Path and Pinterest.

And don’t forget to consider an email link — it’s the oldest social network there is.

Your True Colors

Here’s a choice to make any designer wince: do you upset the careful color balance of your site with a grid of candy hued icons, or do you risk reducing brand recognition with top social sites by applying your own color scheme?

I say, if you pick the best known social networks, their icons should survive any change of color scheme. The Twitter and Facebook icons are recognizable whether they’re rendered in regulation blue or gun-metal grey. Go for it.

Roll Your Own

The first rule of making your own social buttons, is not to reinvent them too much. If you deviate from the designs and iconography that people know, they’ll fail that all-important instant recognition test.

First, you’ll need the all-important Facebook “F” logo as an image. You can grab a version from Facebook’s branding page  (I used the PNG version). Read the rules for use while you’re there. (By the way, you can find official branding livery for Twitter and Google, too.)

Start with a simple template at a standard size of 128×128 pixels in Photoshop, then drag in the Facebook logo on a new layer. Position and crop into the “F”.

You can experiment with blending and layer effects. In the example here, I’ve bevelled the layer with the rounded rectangle and blended the “F” logo using “divide.” I saved the whole thing out as a PSD file when I was happy with the overall look.

The template can easily be reused to make Twitter and Google+ icons. The icons themselves are saved as PNG files, using “Save for Web and Devices.”

In Plain Sight

The alternative to color coded, ultra-discreet buttons that blend into your design?  Hide your button collection in a pop-up. For example, SoundCloud uses a prominent, but discreet text link that simply says “Share.”

Follow its lead and you can keep your design clean and use the original livery of each social network. No mess, no clutter.

Implementing pop-up code with CSS is pretty easy. There are some neat examples at JavaScript Toolbox. Just place your social media buttons in the hidden DIV and you avoid compromise on every level.

And if creating your own buttons sounds less inviting than an afternoon breaking rocks, the web is chock full of ready to use social media buttons. Some of our favorites can be found on SixRevisions, PeachPoPs ElegantThemes.

Image courtesy of Flickr, chollingsworth3

The post How To Design Social Sharing Buttons appeared first on Contently.

The eye-friendly design is actually a good fit for magazines, whose image-centric content often appears on Pinterest without permission anyway. Plus its easy to navigate, is a proven hit with women, and adapts seamlessly to a user’s screen.

The bottom line? Expect to see more Pinterest-esque layouts in the future. Paid Content reported that similar redesigns are in store for fellow Conde publications Vogue, Wired, and GQ in the near future.

The post Conde Nast’s ‘Easy Living’ Redesign Looks Like Pinterest appeared first on Contently.

The team at Hubspot created a really useful infographic explaining the 12 crucial homepage elements your site should not be without.

We loved their list so much we thought we’d share it!

Check out the infographic below and let us know how many of these elements your site has. Are there any that you definitely would or wouldn’t include? Voice your thoughts in the comments below.

Inspired enough for a re-design? Check out our tips on how to re-design your blog without being a design pro!

Image courtesy of Flickr, deramko

The post 12 Crucial Homepage Elements Your Website Must Have [INFOGRAPHIC] appeared first on Contently.

The idea of customizing content that tailors to different sides of the brain is an interesting discussion. As the concept goes, left-brain thinkers are more rational and sequential, while right-brainers are more inspired by random and free-associated design. So, why not cater to those different ways of thinking?

“The best websites, blogs, and social pages (Facebook and G+ for example) include a combination of text content, images, video and charts.” Scott notes. “Your goal is to create a mix so that people who are visual have an infographic or photo and those who are analytical might have text and numerical charts.”

This is a really interesting way of looking at the psychology of a customer. In an age where we are trying to guess where a customer is going next, it’s refreshing to take a step back and think about how they interpret the world around them.

Image courtesy of Jeanie Jeanie

The post Customizing Content Design for Left and Right Brain Thinkers appeared first on Contently.

A good site redesign follows business objectives while creating an aesthetically pleasing experience for readers. The best site redesigns challenge the status quo in editorial while considering the needs of the readers, and how they discover and consume information.  Gawker, Mashable, and Vogue all had site redesigns that made an impact on their business and showcased their innovation.

1. Gawker Redesign – February 2011

Objective: Increase Page Views

Gossip blog Gawker redesigned its site earlier this year to encourage more click-throughs, leading to more page views and eventually more advertising dollars. Founder Nick Denton observed how sites like TMZ were known for getting the latest scoop and wanted to create the same phenomenon for Gawker.  However, while the traditional reverse-chronological blog format showed the latest story, it did not allow for the best story of the day to be featured.

The “New” Gawker Layout

The current design allows feature stories to have real estate via a splash story template instead of being pushed down by more recent stories. When a person links to the post, they receive not just a single story but a supplementary index of other recent items. Since the web is becoming a more visual medium, each story now has a large visual such as a video or photo to accompany it.

2. Mashable Redesign – December 2010

Objective: Focus on Content

When you are a leading editorial publisher with audiences worldwide, your best product is your content and the columnists who write it.  Mashable’s previous design was cluttered and difficult to navigate through. The current design features an adjusted header with navigation to specific topics, organizes content into categories, and brings attention to a trending story before showing the most recent.  Offering more categories expanded the blog’s audience and better targeted current readers.

The “New” Mashable

Columnists are highlighted via a new sidebar feature with recent stories they have written.  For each post, the author’s image is posted below the preview along with a time stamp of how recently the article was written. The design includes more white space, providing a cleaner reader-friendly design. Mashable could not call itself the leading social and tech blog if sharing wasn’t encouraged. Readers can log in and “share through Mashable” or through any of their preferred social networks.

3. Vogue Redesign – September 2010

Objective: Bring Brand Values to Digital Realm

In 2010, Vogue found itself with an audience that was becoming more engaged in digital. Vogue catered to that audience and revamped its website to show its authority on fashion and its focus on style online.  Since Vogue’s print magazine is known for its impeccable aesthetic appeal, the same had to apply to its site. The colors and typefaces are dramatic, images are huge and social sharing is encouraged along with opportunities to interact with the content. An interesting feature are “lightboxes” which readers utilize as their own bookmarking tool or lookbook, making the browsing experience more interactive.

The “New” Vogue Digital

The magazine or “editorial” layout lends itself very well to a site that is essentially a digital version of Vogue magazine itself. The site offers a multimedia experience with full-screen slideshows and videos. There is currently a full-screen slideshow featuring the Vogue Archives with 125 years’ worth of covers readers can browse through. Vogue’s site design enhances the overall editorial experience, where both site and print publication can support one another.

Every time a new website design is introduced, there is always reader backlash since it momentarily disrupts their browsing routine. With innovation comes resistance, since people enjoy what’s familiar. However, companies like Gawker Media, Conde Nast (which owns Vogue), and Mashable are known for challenging the status quo, which has been key to keeping their blogs at the forefront of digital media.

Related articles

• Build a Gorgeous Blog without a Design Degree (contently.com)
• 7 Factors to Consider When Redesigning Your Website (mashable.com)
• How To Make Your Blog Posts As Shareable As Mashable’s (contently.com)
• 10 Tools For Converting Your Blog’s New Visitors Into Fans (contently.com)

The post 3 Excellent Blog Makeovers to Learn From appeared first on Contently.

image via banderdash.net

1. Know the Common Building Blocks

Learn the basic design elements. You might not use them all (perhaps you don’t run ads, for example). But you need a header that says who you are, an area for your content, navigation, headlines for each post, a place for reader comments, social network and subscription links, a footer (the bottom-most area) for each post, and a site footer.

Also consider smart design from other publishing areas, like the magazine deck — the single sentence below the headline that both summarizes and sells an article’s content. It helps draw people in and works better than running each first sentence in a list of posts.

2. Plan It Out

Designers start with a plan. Create a list of what needs to appear on your blog. Do you plan separate sections for original and curated content? Will there be a blog roll? A feed from your Twitter account?  Next, take pencil and paper and do a rough sketch of what the blog should look like in the browser.

Don’t worry about your drawing ability. Just block out the major areas you need and label them. One-column, two-column, and three-column layouts offer trade-offs — additional columns give more options of where to put elements of the blog, but can look more cluttered. Try different arrangements and see what seems most appealing while making changes only means using an eraser.

3. Find Inspiration

Look at successful blogs, such as Problogger, Copyblogger, boingboing, or Gawker. Find  blogs you admire that address a similar audience as yours. Consider why the site works visually, doing a block diagram as part of the analysis.

Gawker’s layout provides maximum opportunities for reading content

What appeals to you? Compare these layouts to the ones you previously sketched. What changes could improve them? Why do you like one header over another? Maybe it conveys an image of calm or, contrarily, excitement. You might respond to the color scheme or a powerful image. What does the use of fonts say to you? Modern? Solid and rooted in tradition? Eccentric? View the page source. See how large images are set and what typefaces the designer used.

Boing Boing’s approach is more visual then Gawker’s

Don’t simply copy the site. Success comes from finding your own voice and look. Remember the famous saying: Good artists copy; great artists steal.’

4. Learn the Code

This step may take time, but the investment will be worthwhile. It’s easy to use a preexisting template or theme in a blog, but what you get isn’t unique … isn’t you. To adapt something already existing or to create your own using examples you can find means you’ll need to write some code.

Simple tutorials like the ones at W3 schools can help you visualize your code, and help you fix your mistakes

You should start with learning some HTML, the basic language of the web. There are free online tutorials like this one. Next, you’ll want to go through atutorial on CSS, which stands for “cascading style sheets.” That will become the critical design layer for your blog.

You’ll also need to learn how code for your particular blogging system goes together. WordPress offers its codex, which is the online manual. The lessons section has tutorials for developers. There are many other online resources as well, including this guide to modifying WordPress themes. Very handy.

Similarly, there is extensive documentation on Movable Type and Google has information on customizing Blogger.

5.  Time to Implement

You know what you want your blog to look like. Now you’re ready to actually put everything together.

Start with an existing theme or template that’s as close to your idea as you can find. Match the number of columns, basic layout, and typography if possible. This puts the essential code into place. Save a backup copy and then edit your working version. Find the images you want for the header. Change colors of everything to what suits you. Shift the column widths and header height. Swap out widgets. Soon enough, you’ll have made the design your own.

Yes, it’s a fair amount of work. But you’ll save money and be proud to know that your blog is really yours.

Related articles

• The Best Tools on WordPress to make your Content Look Great (contently.com)
• 25 Must-Haves for a Remarkable Website (hubspot.com)
• How Big Should Your Blog Be? An Informal Formula (contently.com)
• 10 Tools For Converting Your Blog’s New Visitors Into Fans (contently.com)

The post Build a Gorgeous Blog without a Design Degree appeared first on Contently.

You could change everything by hand, but why not save time with a head start?

Here are some top resources that will help make your WordPress posts more appealing and dynamic.

Presentation: Add some Zing

Zemanta — Analyzes content and suggests relevant images, links, and SEO-optimized tags

NextGEN Gallery — Create slideshows with a choice of effects

morgueFile — Source of royalty-free images, searchable by keyword

OrangeSoda — Remind people to share with this social media slider

WP-Polls — Engage your audience with this reader polling system

Related Posts Thumbnails — Add related posts with thumbnail images at the end of a post

Themes: Get the look you Want … or Build It Yourself

WordPress Theme Storage — A review blog of premium WordPress themes

WPZoom — Professionally-designed premium themes

Carrington — CMS theme framework with drag-and-drop page layout system

Thesis Theme Framework — Premium template system

Community: Places with something to offer the eye

Smashing WordPress — A special section of the online design site SmashingMagazine, devoted to WordPress

DesignMoo — High quality free design resources, including illustrations, fonts, patterns, and textures

InspiredMag — A web design sight with a WordPress tips and resources blog

instantShift — Design tips, tutorials, and free resources

Related articles

• Starting A Company Blog: Tumblr or WordPress? (contently.com)
• 7 Tips To Writing Shareable Content (contently.com)
• The Most Useful WordPress Tutorials for Building Your Own Blog (benway.net)

The post The Best Tools on WordPress to Make Your Content Look Great appeared first on Contently.