So we’ve cleaned up our listings, and our posts are already a lot prettier with images, right? Good.
Now what?
Well, if you’re the kind of person who writes looong blog posts, then you could make them easier to handle with some stylish headings.
Now, before we move on with this you need to figure out something about your theme’s structure. If the author knows his stuff, I’d say he’s got the logo in a h1 tag, and the post title in a h2 tag - but not all swear to this, so make sure.
This means your headings in posts would be h3 tags.
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The blogosphere could be a lot prettier if bloggers just utilized the included options in their blog software, and in their themes. I’ve spoken about ugly listings and what to do to make them more pretty, now it’s time for images.
In my opinion, images are great for making longer blog post seem more attractive. You can use them to lighten a post, illustrate a point, or just capture the reader’s eye.
Take Wisdump for example. While the design of the current version is far from optimal, it utilizes images for just about every post, and makes sure to display them in the listing. This is of course to make you see the post, the eye goes for the image rather than the text, and hopefully this will spark your interest.
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It’s about time we clean up the blogosphere, it doesn’t have to be this ugly, and not everyone needs to hire me or my likes to get a pretty blog. There’s a lot you can do yourself, and most of it is related to your content.
Take a look at your average listing of posts, usually your front page but it could also be a category page or an archive. Post after post after post after post. Boring? Might be. Long? In most cases, yes. Too long? Yep, I’d say so.
I believe in using read more functionality, in other words, in just displaying some of the content (if the post is a semi-long or long one) in post listings. If you display a 20 paragraphs long post after a 30 paragraphs long post, but before a 50 paragraphs long post, then you have a very ugly page.
By using read more functionality, available in any good blogging software, you can show as much content as you like in your listings, and it shouldn’t be too much.
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