How to Build a Dedicated Blog Page in WordPress

Designing and creating a dedicated WordPress blog page is essential for strengthening your digital marketing efforts and making them more authentic. While it may be challenging, every digital business should take part in it.

Blogging attracts new audiences and ultimately increases organic traffic and sales that support your business growth. Do you know why people enjoy reading blogs so much? Well, according to Hubspot, the top three reasons are: to learn something new, to be entertained, and to be informed of new trends within an industry.

Humans are visual by nature and most of your readers will assess your blog the instant they land on it. Your blog page design should highlight the most important information you wish to share and create a pleasant user experience. While great content is a key requirement for a successful business blog, so is the design and layout of your blog page. Hence, in addition to creating thoroughly researched and well-written posts, you need to tag, categorize and organize them so that your content is easily accessible to your readers.

But, how can you attract readers and encourage them to stay, while also ensuring your blog is aesthetically pleasing? Read on to discover 5 ways to build a dedicated blog posts page that your visitors will love.

Why Set Up a Dedicated Blog Post Page for Yоur WordPress Site?

Before we do anything, let’s discuss why you need a blog.

Whether you’re a new start-up or a business that has operated online for some time, adding a blog page to your WordPress website can be extremely beneficial. It allows you to keep all your posts in one place, and organize them accordingly. It also lets you customize your homepage by ensuring that users can easily find the content they’re looking for.

Additionally, with a WordPress blog post page, you would be able to optimize your content’s readability and accentuate the most important information.

1. Understanding How WordPress Themes Work

WordPress is a great content management system (CMS) for creating websites. It allows you to add all sorts of functional features to pages, but the design works a little differently than other CMSs.

While you have the freedom to add menus, pages, media items, blog posts, contact forms, etc, in terms of blog page design, start off with a plain and simple default theme, and If you wish to change it you have two options.

1. You can strip the theme down and construct your site from scratch. But, that’s a more complicated task requiring specialist knowledge and maybe even some external help.
   Or
2. You can use one of the 8,574 free themes to style your site.

WordPress themes offer the quickest way to create a professional site. They allow you to format the chosen style, add fonts and colors, unique navigation headers and menus, etc.

When evaluating your options, make sure to look at the following key elements:

• A multi-purpose design that caters to your different business needs.
• Fast page loading times for a smoother running site.
• Clean and lightweight code that is compatible with popular plugins.
• High-quality customer support.
• A responsive layout that is compatible with different devices.
• A minimalistic blog page design that eliminates clutter and uses whitespace properly.
• The possibility to operate with the built-in WordPress editor.
• The ability to adjust design and branding elements.Read also: 9 Ways to Nurture a Loyal Audience for Your B2B Blog

2. Know the Must-Have Elements of Your WordPress Blog Page

Once you’ve understood how WordPress themes work, you need to ensure your WordPress blog page design supports your content strategy and enhances the user experience.

According to an analysis by the Nielsen Norman Group, the average user needs between 10 and 20 seconds to evaluate your page before clicking the return button. So, to keep their attention for much longer, approach the design process as if you’re creating a landing page for your posts.

Here are the key elements you should include, apart from your blog posts, of course:

• Clear Value Statement – Use one or two sentences to give readers a feel of what to expect.
• Attention-Grabbing Calls to Action – Think about the one thing you really want viewers to do and point it out to them: Subscribe, Sign Up, follow your social media accounts, etc
• Your Latest Posts – This one is essential as it tells readers about your most recent content.
• Your Best Posts – This is optional, but if there are some posts that showcase how amazing your blog is, it might be worth displaying them.
• Topic Themed Categories – A dedicated navigation bar on your WordPress blog post page can help readers navigate through your content better. This is especially helpful when you cater to different buyer personas.
• Your Experience and Background – This tip works really well if you’re building a personal brand. Introduce your readers to who you are, your expertise, and your experience.
• Testimonials – If possible, include a “featured..” list. This can strengthen your credibility.

These are some general tips. You don’t have to use all of them, but they can be good starting points.

3. Leverage a Blog Card Layout

After you’ve decided which elements to include, you need to choose how to display your articles. To keep your website fresh and drive up as much traffic as possible, you’d have to publish content regularly on a monthly, weekly, and daily basis.

However, you don’t want to overwhelm your readers with so much information at once. Hence, you need to come up with a good way to display as many articles as possible while providing a pleasant user experience. A great way to pull this off is by using a blog card layout.

 

When creating your blog card layout, you need to have a consistent structure, where the elements are visually separated by importance with the help of different images and font sizes. When doing so you should incorporate the following elements:

• Featured image
• Blog post title
• Blog author
• Post date
• Topic category
• Blog excerpt
• Expected reading time
• Social share links
• Read more button

When arranging your articles on your blog post page, think about how many posts you’d like to display so you can fully utilize your space without cluttering it.

Read also: WordPress Pages vs WordPress Posts, Common Sense, and SEO

4. Pick a Font that Works Across Devices

If you want to create an amazing reading experience you need to be mindful of the font you use. In order for your long-form copy to drive up site traffic and have your pages rank higher in Google, it needs to be between 1500 and 2000 words. This means that it will take your readers some time to go through everything, and the last thing you want is to frustrate them with an inappropriate font.

Font size and style really affect the reader’s experience. The people who visit your blog will have different reading abilities, use different devices and probably be of different ages. According to a study by CLX people spend less time on larger font sizes and slow down when the font is smaller.

Additionally, variations in font sizes affect the content hierarchy. They help differentiate the page title, the paragraph headings, and the individual sections of content, so users can navigate through the copy quicker and easier.

To ensure your blog is available to everyone and on any device, keep in mind the following:

• Title – The largest font size, approx 70px
• Headings and Subheadings – between 30px – 50px
• Body Font – Minimum 16px, better between 17px – 21px.
• Secondary Text (captions, labels, etc.) – Minimum 13px – 14px

Read also: 9 Blogging Tips to Skyrocket Your Website Content In 2021

5. Turn Your WordPress Blog Post Page into a Learning Centre

Once you have established your blog and start creating content, you will accumulate various types of articles, which you can then categorize and use to your advantage.

You can organize your articles by themes. For example, if you are a web development agency with your own blog, you might have articles specifically dedicated to marketers, business owners, web developers, and anyone interested in learning more about the industry.

Additionally, if you want to take it a step further, you can turn your WordPress blog page into a learning center. There are a few ways to approach this.

One way is to create a side menu where users can filter the content by topic, buyer persona, or content type (for example guide, expert opinion, tutorial, etc), then sort them out by recent or most popular posts, like iMPACT.

 

Or you can use a drop-down bar like Moz’s Explore by Category.

 

Another approach you can take is to divide your main topics into subtopics and create a menu that links directly to them. Like on Aqualia’s blog, where the articles that are most comprehensive appear first, followed by the ones that are most popular for the selected subtopic or that would be useful to users. 

 

Wrapping Up

By implementing these five tips you can really transform your blog. The right layout practices can significantly enhance the reader’s experience, and thus drive up traffic and increase conversion.

So, gather together your team and start brainstorming today. If you need some guidance along the way, don’t hesitate to contact us!