Blog index page layout ideas and options
Your blogs index page layout
How to lay out your blog so your users find it useful is important, and to a greater extent will depend on your business sector and user profiles. The main options are:
- A simple list, typically one column
- A list with an image on the left and text on the right
- Images with text over them
- Images with text underneath or above
See graphical layouts as screenshots here.
Blog index content
From an information perspective we can add anything in the post into the main index page. For example:
- Blog title
- Author
- Date
- Categories
- Text excerpt from the post
Right column or no right column
Typically a blog index page will have a right column for the search, perhaps a signup form, and a list of categories for navigation. If you only publish NEWS for example then you may not need any of these in which case there is no requirement for a right column.
There are amy other uses for the right column as you can see in these two examples https://cashandcarrymanagement.co.uk/Â and https://www.sipsecopanels.co.uk/blog/
Searching and navigation
If you are going to have many posts, say over 30, then you really need a search option which is best located at the top of a right column or above the posts.
Categories
If you have blog content that can be split up into categories then this is very helpful for users trying to find your posts on a particular subject. We recommend keeping to 10 categories if possible but here, due to the large number of topics, we've had to break our own rule, see https://alpha-tango.co.uk/blog/
Using Categories to create different news pages
For example on there sites https://cashandcarrymanagement.co.uk/ and https://2020-recruitment.com/ if you click on the NEWS link you'll see a dropdown which offers different categories and shows the page with just those categories in it.
You can also use a filter as seen in some of the examples below to filter what the user sees by category.
Blog signup so you can notify users of new posts
On our blog e have a signup option and automatically send out an email to the "list" via Mailchimp when a new post is published. This can be very useful for users that are interested in your posts and saves them "keeping an eye" on your blog. Mailchimp is free and it's pretty simple to setup the auto RSS feed email.
LAYOUT EXAMPLES
Here are a few examples from our lovely clients, click on the images to see them in a larger size.
