Blogs provide great value to digital enterprises. Not only can blog content be used for marketing initiatives on other channels (like social or email) and as a website traffic driver, but it can also help a brand generate trust from its customer base and gain authority within its industry.
In fact, HubSpot's 2013 State of Inbound Marketing report reveals that 43 percent of marketers acquired a customer via their blog this year. And while much of a blog's success depends on its content, aspects like design and functionality cannot be overlooked. After all, the most insightful article will not garner attention if it is hard to access or the layout makes it difficult to read. To get inspiration for your business blog design, check out the examples below:
Design Takeaway: In Your Face Images
Teavana leveraged an image-tile layout for its design, which makes the content visually appealing and more likely to obtain clicks. In addition to visual elements, Teavana provides a prominent search bar on the top of the blog's homepage as well as filtering options on the right side, which makes content easy to find.
Design Takeaway: Get Personal
Target's blog takes a personal approach, not only with its content, but also with its design. This is because the retailer features blogs from its employees, and in doing so, displays each employee's photo on their respective blog posts. This makes the company more relatable for consumers. Aside from this personal strategy, the retailer also sticks to its red and white color scheme throughout the blog, which makes the design appear clean and makes the content easy to read.
Design Takeaway: Showcase Top Content
myInsens implements a simple, yet, effective design. The light colored background makes the content stand out, while the featured slideshow at the top of the page shows off the company's best content. Moreover, each article's title is made noticeable through a combination of green, italicized and larger text. The company also makes it easy for readers to find older content by featuring an Archives section, which is organized by month and year.
Design Takeaway: Dazzling Content Discovery
The Constant Contact blog is very robust, but leverages quite a few design best practices, such as a light color scheme, simple design and a feature slideshow. Furthermore, Constant Contact includes a variety of content discovery options on its blog, including a search bar, navigation menu, popular post section and word cloud that shows what topics are talked about most often.
Design Takeaway: Main Site Love
This blog is nice for a variety of reasons; however, the single best design aspect is the prominent link to the company's main website on the top of the landing page. While this seems like it should be an obvious design element for business blogs (after all, blog content should help navigate customers through the sales cycle), many companies either neglect doing this or put the link somewhere where it is not easily found. In addition, Birchbox includes a "You Might Also Like" underneath some of its articles, which is effective at pushing readers to more pages, hence, increasing time on site and page view metrics.