While a strong homepage design can showcase your top stories and highlight the categories you most regularly update, it’s also important to keep design in mind with your story pages as well.
Here are a few tips to keep in mind when designing a story page – you can definitely design your pages to fit these suggestions using SNO’s story page tools, and should be able to apply them to any website:
- Be mindful of which story template you use, and choose an appropriate option (e.g. don’t use a long-form story format to post new briefs, but you might consider an infobox).
- While reading the story try to avoid only ever seeing body text on the screen – Break up long blocks of text with SNO Story Elements, secondary images, or other visual elements.
- Similar to print design, avoid having body text that is too small across a column that is too wide, as that will be difficult for your reader’s eye to follow. Consider using the Story Template Editor to adjust the body text size or column width on your templates.
- Discuss and plan what content you want to display in your sidebars for any of the templates that contain one or more sidebars. If your staff has a solid grasp of the design tools you might consider creating custom sidebars and headers for your individual story categories.
- Make sure to showcase related content, which encourages readers to check out other stories when they finish reading what they initially clicked on.
These tips should help make your story pages more visually appealing for readers and hopefully get them to click other stories on your site. Happy designing!
Written By: Kyle Phillips, CJE
