Got a lot of blog content? Try a magazine layout!

Magazine themes allow you to present content vertically: arranged by categories or tags, as if you had sections in a newspaper or a magazine.

Recently I revamped the CIAT DAPA blog. Or should I say blogS, as they had five separate blogs, which referred one to another. Each of the old blogs had a sequential layout:

The old DAPA blog

A magazine layout gives easy access to more content

Long gone are the times where blogs were just a mere sequential series of short posts. Some blogs have grown to thousands of content pieces. Keeping a large blog as just a serial row of posts will obscure content for your visitors, allowing only horizontal navigation: from post to post to post to post… Key “must-read” content will often disappear from the reader’s attention as soon as it slides off the front page.

Rather than keeping them separate, I suggested to join them into one blog. But as they had a lot of content already, we chose for a magazine layout to make the content more easily accessible.

I started from the Branford Pro Magazine theme, but customized it heavily based on the client’s requirements.

The end result has many several vertical navigation tools on the home page:

• The top anchor list gives access to key pages explaining who and what “DAPA” is;
• The navigation bar allows hierarchical category navigation
• A large spotlight bar shows the post we want to highlight, with a list of the latest posts.
• The left main column shows featured posts, useful when key content would normally have disappeared from a home page
• The right main column shows the latest post from each category

When you read any single post, the side bar will display other posts from the same author, and from the same categories.

In the end we decided to implement the same layout to the CIAT Capacity Strengthening blog. Again, there was a night and day difference between the old and new blog:

The old CIAT capacity blog

The new CIAT Capacity blog

We decided to add the Linkwithin widget row below each post, giving access to related posts, as another navigation method. At the bottom of the post, we also added links to the previous and next posts. All a question of encouraging visitors to go on navigating through the content.

A totally different magazine layout was given to the CIAT Frutisitio blog (here with dummy content, running on a test server). This customized template resembles more a newspaper with plenty of widgets presenting different content types, such as video, slides, a map, an events calendar, pictures,…:

The new Frutisitio blog: more content, more features

And while I think of it.. As the content on BlogTips is growing, maybe I should think of a magazine layout also? Or should I keep it simpler, and continue to use the plain vanilla Thesis theme I use now?

Ah, the blogger dilemma’s!

                                                                                                       by blogtips.org