A blog is more than just a platform for sharing thoughts—it’s a powerful tool for engaging audiences, establishing authority, and bolstering your online presence. Adhering to blog design best practices not only enhances your site’s aesthetic appeal, but also strengthens the functional aspect, ensuring that your content isn’t just seen, but savored. 

Let’s walk through where form meets function, and cover some essential elements you should be considering when designing your blog. 

9 Essential Elements of a Blog Design

Great blog design is a symphony of elements working together to present content in an engaging and accessible way. From crafting a responsive design that maintains layout clarity, to making sure your byline follows E-E-A-T (experience, expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness) best practices, here’s a list of items you should be considering. 

1. Design an Eye-catching Blog Homepage

First, let’s zoom out and take a holistic look at your site. Is your blog homepage up to snuff? Your homepage is the gateway to your blog posts, and its design echoes the voice of your brand. An impactful blog homepage should not be a cluttered billboard—prioritize simplicity with a minimalist approach that ensures a distraction-free introduction and strive for brand consistency with cohesive design elements like colors and fonts that write a strong brand narrative. Also, make sure you’re incorporating engaging, high-resolution visuals and a clear navigation that directs traffic where you want it to go.

2. Include Headers Within Each Post

Make sure you organize your post content with purpose using clear, enticing headers. Headers play an undervalued role in presenting and structuring your blog content, serving not only as signposts, but also as silent narrators of your blog’s story. Use headers to visually break up text and make your content more digestible, and incorporate descending headers tags throughout an article (H1, H2, H3) to foster coherence and SEO efficiency—for example, a header is a great place to plug in a target keyword. When you’re designing the look and feel of different header types, make sure you clearly differentiate them using size and color to establish visual hierarchy. 

3. Incorporate Empty Space

Embrace the art of nothingness. In blog design, empty space is anything but vacant. It gives readers much-needed room to breathe between long paragraphs and new concepts and visually, it de-clutters your article. Leverage white space as part of your visual hierarchy strategy, too—these important breaks can help guide readers through different content elements with ease. Finally, margins and padding are important white spaces to consider because they’re essential to defining the space and structure of the overall page.

4. Use Simple Navigation

Curate a smooth journey through your blog with a simple navigation structure. A well-structured navigation paves the road for readers, and enables discovery without roadblocks. Use clear labels and menus with drop-down menus that provide easy access to subtopics, leverage familiar layouts that mimic those of your competitors’, make sure your navigation is mobile-responsive, and incorporate a simple search functionality so that visitors can easily type in a keyword and find what they’re looking for on your site.  

5. Display Article Thumbnails

It’s like the trailer for a really good movie—readers want a taste of what the topic is about with a quick, scannable thumbnail. If you must, feel free to call it “click bait.” To pick a great thumbnail, choose imagery that captures the essence of your article and piques interest. And, be sure to stay consistent in style across your blog so that the thumbnails have a gallery-like quality on the main hub page. Finally, remember that speed and quality are paramount—optimize thumbnails to load swiftly and retain clarity. 

6. Show Related Posts

Keep your audience engaged by promoting related posts in the sidebar or at the end of an article. Related posts are your blog’s way of saying, “Hey, if you like this, you’re going to love that.” It’s a nudge toward a content rabbit hole and keeps users on site longer. You can use a sophisticated algorithm or tagging system to ensure relevance, or you can build a custom element in the backend that allows you to specify a few specific articles you’d like readers to check out after reading a certain piece. As an added bonus, a related reads section also supports your SEO efforts with a few more inlinks on the page that you might have otherwise missed. 

7. Allow Social Media Sharing

Tap into the power of networks. By integrating social media sharing buttons somewhere on your blog page, you invite readers to extend your blog’s reach across their personal networks. To do this effectively, ensure visibility and convenience—sharing options should not be prominent or overly intrusive. And, consider tailoring the aesthetic of the sharing icons to match your blog’s overall design to maintain recognizable shapes and sizes across your brand. 

8. Add an “About The Author” Page

Connect with your audience on a personal level by creating an “About The Author” page for each author. This helps do a few things—it gives credit to the author, it humanizes the blog and provides context, and it supports Google’s E-E-A-T by establishing why said author is qualified to cover the topic. You can customize the page experience by either adding it as a pop up window that displays when a reader clicks on the author’s name in the byline, or it can be its own short indexable page that opens in a new window when the author’s name is clicked on in the byline. 

9. Show off Your Expertise

Building off of the last item, take your byline to the next level and support E-E-A-T by having each article reviewed by an industry or topic expert. Once you source an expert to review and sign off on each piece, you can add a “Reviewed By” designation in the byline and create a similar “About The Expert '' page that tells readers more about why the expert is a trusted source of information. 

A blog is about more than words on a page—it’s about establishing trustworthiness and credibility, and it’s about supporting your overall brand strategy. Looking to support your blog strategy overall? Contact our team to learn more about our SEO content services.