In this article, we provide our best blog design ideas for your SaaS. Check out our WordPress Development page to find out more about our CMS solutions.
Introduction
If you’ve ever gone on the internet you’ve probably heard the term blog/blogging. According to the Oxford dictionary, a blog is a website where an individual person, or people representing an organization, writes regularly about recent events or topics that interest them, usually with photos and links to other websites that they find interesting.
The first blog was written in 1994, by Justin Hall, on Links.net. Since then it evolved from a simple collection of thoughts and opinions into one of the most powerful marketing tools on the internet. If not the most powerful marketing tool.
In today’s super hyped internet era where everyone has access to the internet, and almost anyone is able to have their website and blog, people are using different techniques to stand out.
One of the fastest and simplest ways to be different from your competition, or other blogs in general, is to have an awesome blog design. Stories and emotions sell the product, but design catches the eye. So, it’s really important to have a design that will draw attention.
Blog design guidelines
A blog is mainly focused on content, written content. As such, we have to make sure that our users enjoy while they’re reading our blog.
Here are some considerations when designing a blog:
- Layout – A blog layout is very important. You have to have clear navigation. Depending on the blog size navigation can be anything from categories, to custom multi-level menu items. Also, your content area has to be clearly defined with visible boundaries. The footer can help you a lot especially when it comes to interlinking your content. Make sure that every part of the webpage is clearly defined. Users love simplicity and clarity, they can focus more easily.
- White space – White space is a really important part of every website, so it’s an important part of the blog. Make sure your design has enough “breathing space” because cluttered design, especially with blogs, can have a high bounce rate.
- Images – Your images should be high quality. There is no real indicator of whether stock images work better or designed ones, but either way, they should be high quality. High-quality images give that crisp feeling to your blog, which can impact your readers’ opinion on the quality of your blog.
- Readability – Spend lots of time making sure that your blog is readable because people are there to read it. Make sure your sentences aren’t too long. Studies have shown that the optimal line length is 60 characters. Leave space between paragraphs and use a proper line-height. That breathing space will make your design less cluttered. Check the size of your font, you don’t want too small or too big a font. With high-resolution screens, 16px font size became the standard. But depending on the font family, this can vary.
- Accessibility – Accessibility is more than a right contrast. Accessibility means that you have the right font size, right colors, filled ALT tags, properly set tab indexes, and many more. This doesn’t help only “a handful of people”. This primarily helps you because everyone enjoys good contrast, everyone needs beautiful colors, you will broaden your list of users, Google will reward you with better positioning, and a lot more benefits.
- CTA – Always make sure to add additional CTA at the end of your article card. This is a great incentive for your users to keep reading. CTA inside your blog post should be a link to another blog post with some interesting stuff from it.
- Newsletter – If you spend time on your blog then you should get something from it. The easiest way to do something like that is to add a Newsletter section to your blog, or some other kind of form. This really depends on your preference. Maybe you’re not interested in the newsletter, but you’re interested in meetings. So, you can leave a short form for users to book a meeting.
We, at Clio Websites, spend a lot of time on UX and UI research while coming up with blog design ideas. We value each and every user and we try to make our designs both appealing and useful.
Best blog design ideas for your SaaS
We have compiled a list of blogs with the most interesting design features. Each of these blog design ideas is special and intriguing. Maybe this can give you inspiration for your own blog.
Elementor.com
Elementor is the most popular WordPress website builder, and one of the most popular website builders in general. Elementor is installed on more than 9M websites and has over 4.5K five-star reviews. They’re investing a lot in their blog. They write about different approaches to different topics like different types of web design, the most beautiful websites (built with Elementor) of the month, a lot of how-tos, etc.
Their blog checks all the boxes from above, and much more. The best thing about their blog, that we like, is the thumbnails and font choice. Also, the layout of the article itself is quite amazing.
Cloudways.com
Clio websites is an agency specializing in WordPress websites. And as such we always seek new ways to improve our services. One of the ways that we can improve our services is by using a great hosting provider. While searching for one we stumbled upon this awesome-looking website and awesome-looking blog at CloudWays.com.
We really love how they emphasized their latest article with a great heading that stands out, along with some cool thumbnails. Also, the overall feeling while reading the blog, in terms of UX is phenomenal. We love how the social icons are always present on the side, and also how you got an awesome blue line at the top to indicate how much of an article you have read so far.
Smartpassiveincome.com
If you ever tried to type passive income to your Google search, chances are you’ve stumbled upon the SPI blog.
This is one of the most beautiful blogs on the internet, and also one of the most user-friendly blogs. This blog is a result of years of working with users and trying to improve both content and user experience. Any list of best blog design ideas would not be complete without the SPI blog.
On the homepage they offer a filter, to see only articles from the category that you’re interested in. They also use different colors for different categories, to help us pick our articles easier. At the bottom of the article card, they use “Learn more →” CTA to encourage the user to keep reading.
Their use of white space is incredible. Line height is somewhat larger than we are used to, but it fits nicely with the overall design. Also, the content is highly readable and interesting cause they mix it with other elements like subtitles, lists, images, videos, gifs, etc.
Slack.com
This is one of the most interesting designs you will find on the internet. Since Slack is a communication tool, they call their blog “Someone is typing” which is awesome cause it’s ambiguous. Also, their blog design is not something you’ll see every day. They’re leveraging responsive design a lot since most of their content is full width. They also, mainly, use illustrations that contribute to the overall feeling of the blog.
The body of the article is also different than most of the other blogs. They use 50%-50% between the featured image and the heading. Their readability is amazing. Also, instead of a standard social media floater on the right/left side, they use TOC. This is awesome, cause you can always see what have you read and how far have you come.
Grammarly.com
Our favorite tool for spell-checking also has an awesome blog design. Unlike Slack, Grammarly uses border-radius and shadow to make its design a little softer. Their font choice follows their soft design, making it quite friendly. The color palette that Grammarly designers chose has excellent contrast with the background, yet it’s not so strong.
Conclusion
As we said in our intro, there are no ultimate guides to perfect design, but there are definitely some good practices to follow. Always make sure that you take care of readability, accessibility, white space, and other necessary things.
Also, keep in mind that a blog is a powerful marketing tool. You should always have a CTA to call users to leave their contact information or to contact you. This is really important if you want to utilize your blog to it’s full potential.
Sometimes, the best blog design ideas are not always the most useful blog design ideas. We, at Clio Websites, can help you with some additional guides to create an awesome blog and an awesome website.
If you want to know more about creating a website you can read one of our other articles on that subject check out: Website Launch Checklist: 15 Things to Check Before Launching Your Website.
