Awesome New Ways to Proudly Display Your Blog Posts

Blogging is still huge. WordPress powers 75 million sites across the internet. Thousands of new blogs are being launched everyday. How can you stand out and proudly display your blog posts?

Blogging may be the staple of WordPress but there’s no reason for your blog to look like everyone else’s.

The stats blasted at new bloggers can be intimidating. Amongst all that competition, how are you supposed to stand out?

We’ve seen a big rise in WordPress websites that look nothing like blogs… but blogs that look nothing like blogs?

There are always trends in webdesign and WordPress themes for bloggers are no different. Magazine-style layouts are all the rage, packing as many relevant posts above the fold as possible. To answer that trend, minimalism in blogging has been making a comeback. Getting rid of sidebars, going for an uncluttered look that lets the content speak for itself.

Weblogging is all about chronology but there’s been a rush in WordPress themes for bloggers to get away from the more time-based format. Not everyone wants their content to be dated or to organise things in a chronological way.

The WordPress theme for bloggers that embraces time

The Epic Timeline theme is a WordPress theme for bloggers that puts the chronology centrestage. It’s a brilliant new way to display your blog posts.

But this standard back-to-front reverse chronological order doesn’t work for all types of blogs. If you want someone to follow a story along with you blogs are not the most helpful. Forcing your audience to skip to the end (spoilers!) rather than starting at the beginning. With Epic Timeline people can go back to the start and read along with you.

On the other hand, sometimes you really need a sticky post. An important announcement or update that you want at the top of your timeline. Not many themes have that yet though it has been added on Twitter, setting a standard there. With Epic Timeline you can make any post sticky and have it displayed at the start of your timeline blog.

It’s an arresting visual and provokes intrigue in your site visitors. It’s not a blog format they will have seen elsewhere and they will want to stick around to check it out. The view is uncluttered and minimalist, letting the posts speak for themselves.

There are a few timeline plugins that do a similar job. The disadvantage of using a plugin in a different theme is that the timeline view is sort of shoehorned in. With the Epic Timeline theme the timeline feature is front and centre and everything is designed around that.

Epic Timeline is a stand-out WordPress theme for bloggers.

Images for blog posts

Take the road less travelled with your blog post images too. Avoid all the stock images everyone else is using.

Stunning and artistic images are freely (and legally) available all over the web. Unsplash and Pexels have thousands upon thousands of copyright-free images to use. And with so many on offer, with such variety, you’ll be sure to find something your audience have never seen before.

Having a good looking graphic to accompany your post (like the one on top of this post!) doesn’t have to be complicated. If you have some experience in image editing software you can put together a template pretty easily.

Or you can use an online service like Canva or Pablo – no software needed. They have great images and preset templates with fun fonts. If you find something you like you can keep using it and even incorporate your branding too.

Social updates with images tend to do better and have more engagement than plain text. You also get a bit of extra space on an image to add a longer title, subtitle and call to action.

What are masonry layouts?

You might have noticed this term popping up a lot in new themes. What does “masonry layout” mean? It’s a grid layout that uses JavaScript to work out the space available and then build up vertical columns – like a stonemason.

It became popular with sites like Pinterest – the first big site to use the layout – and is now a trendy addition to new WordPress themes for bloggers. Previously, grid layouts used a fixed height row. Not only did this look a bit straightlaced but it could cause problems if one element was larger than another and overlapped or started behaving strangely.

Masonry layouts look great because they remove the need for uniformity and blur a bit of the line around the strict chronological order.

It’s easy to proudly display your blog posts with the right WordPress theme for bloggers, different layouts and bold use of images. If you are tired of samey-looking themes try these great tips to inject some new life into your blog.

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