Are you building or growing a Webflow blog? Awesome. In this post, we're serving up tips, examples, templates and optimization workflows so your blogging efforts will be successful. And beautifully designed, of course.
Webflow, a drag-and-drop platform that empowers designers to build responsive websites without writing code, has been gaining popularity over the past year. Don't believe us?
Just check out the Google trends data. In 2018, mentions of the company steadily increased, and in 2019, there are no signs of stopping.
StoryChief integrates with Webflow! 🚀
Webflow is a fan favorite for ease of use and customer support. The tool is especially popular with designers who don't have development skills. ⚙️
At StoryChief, we're all for making things easy, time-efficient and fun. In fact, StoryChief integrates with Webflow so you can easily publish content to your Webflow blog and instantly distribute it to your other marketing channels, such as your email newsletter and your brand ambassadors' social media accounts. Check out our minute-long announcement video for the deets.
Alright. Let's setup and optimize your blog! 🙌
Table of contents:
- What sets Webflow apart from other CMSs
- Webflow blog examples
- Webflow blog templates
- Webflow tutorials and resources for bloggers
- Best practices when growing your blog using Webflow
- Determine what your blog categories will be early on
- SEO optimize every blog post
- Promote your blog posts on multiple channels
- Make it easy to update content across channels
What sets Webflow blogs apart from other CMSs
Compared with a Wordpress site, Webflow makes it much easier to design the home page for your blog, whether that's a subdomain (blog.yoursite.com) or a folder (yoursite.com/blog) or whether it's the home page of your main site.
Without needing to have more advanced design skills, you can typically only make a simple blog page in Wordpress, which includes the header photo, title and first line of text for every blog post and lists them in the page in reverse chronological order.
But with Webflow, it's easier to create a unique blog home page that includes:
- A featured post
- A featured post in each category
- An opt-in for the newsletter or blog subscription
Some designers say that using Webflow for your blog is like getting the robust features of a Wordpress CMS but with the easy editing and designing that Squarespace offers.
So if you've built your website on Webflow and you're wondering if you need to use a different tool for your blog, the answer is probably not. In addition to making it easy to make your blog's main page, Webflow has all of the CMS features you need, like SEO fields, blog post categories and various user permissions. If you're unsure if Webflow is right for your blog, you can visit this page to learn more about the Webflow CMS to see if it meets all of your needs.
Webflow blog examples
Whether you're setting up a new Webflow blog or getting read to redo your existing blog's home page, real live examples are more helpful than a bunch of ideas.
Let's see what other Webflow blog users are doing.
YourStory
YourStory is a tech and business news website in India. This example is illuminating because they're able to display ads in a way that doesn't detract from the user experience. On the blog's main page, they have a banner ad and a side bar ad.
The blog's main page also features a slider for a featured article and a side bar for a featured capsule story.
Below the featured posts at the top of the page, the posts are listed in reverse chronological order and are also categorized by content theme and by content type, such as videos.
All in all, this Webflow blog example has:
- Featured articles
- Categorized content
- Chronological content
- Image display advertisements
If you're revamping the home page for an existing digital publication, then the YourStory example is certainly worth checking out!
Team Building Kits
Team Building Kits is exactly what is sounds like — team building exercises for businesses delivered in a kit. It was founded by the creators of Hunt A Killer, an innovative subscription box that gives you a new serial killer murder mystery to solve every month.
The Team Building Kits blog has a simpler, more standard set up. It features a hero image and tag line "building stronger and more unified teams" to positively brand the company offering. Below that, there's a reverse chronological list of recent posts.
If you're creating a new blog that doesn't have a ton of content, or doesn't yet need a complex main page, then this set up is a great option for you.
Periscope Data
The blog for Periscope Data, an analytics software platform for data teams, has one big bold featured post on top and then rows of posts below that.
Above the featured post, there are 8 content categories, allowing readers to easily navigate between the different topics.
The Periscope Data blog is a great example for other B2B companies. The large featured posts help your communications team make sure that important news doesn't get buried in the site, while the categories allow prospects to self-educate during long buying cycles.
Hive
Hive is an email marketing CRM. Their blog is similar to Periscope Data in that it has one large featured post on top, but it differs with the addition of some other great widgets, such as social media icons and a blog subscription.
The Hive blog also has content tags to enable fast navigation through the different topics.
All together, Hive's main blog includes:
- A single, large featured post
- A blog subscription optin
- Social media icons
- A tag cloud
- Chronlogical posts (where the featured image switches from left to right for every other post)
Because it's a robust page, this example can work not only in the B2B and software space, but also for lifestyle bloggers and digital publishers as well.
The fact that Webflow makes it easy to customize your blog's home page is awesome. With Wordpress, you'd be paying a pretty penny to have this done for you by a professional designer.
Webflow blog templates
There are a few different Webflow templates that were created specifically for blog sites. Here are some of the best ones, in terms of having an industry-neutral design that would be easy to put your unique style on.
The Unletro template
With simple black and white font, you can't go wrong with the Unletro template. The featured images for each post will take center stage.
The Press template
Perfect for news publications or any blog with a plethora of categories, the Press template makes it easy for readers to get a snapshot of featured content and navigate through their favorite categories.
The Write template
With an image-first design approach, the Write template will be great for lifestyle bloggers. You can put your blog categories on top, which is a must have feature for many content creators. Because it's so simple and clean, this blog template could easily be used by just about any company or digital publisher.
The Inc template
Designed for blogs featuring multiple writers, the Inc template has a static featured post on the left and allows for scrolling on the right simultaneously. Pretty cool! The featured post could be anything you want it to be, but in the example, they've made it about the writer so it serves as an introduction to who they are and their work. For that reason, this could be a great fit for a personal brand.
Webflow tutorials and resources for bloggers
As you re-design your Webflow blog and grow your readership over time, you'll undoubtedly have questions.
We've done some research for you and have hand-selected some of the most helpful webflow resources available.
- The Webflow designers Global Facebook group
- This course on the Webflow CMS from Webflow University
- This quick video on designing pages for Blog collections
- (For advanced users) This Webflow tutorial on creating a custom blog post
- (For beginners) This Webflow tutorial on quickly setting up your Webflow blog for the first time
- This short video on how the StoryChief integration with Webflow lets you securely collaborate with all writers and easily publish to multiple channels
Best practices when growing your blog using Webflow
All technical things aside (see above for tutorials), the best practices for a Webflow blog aren't much different than they are for a blog built on Medium, Wordpress and Squarespace. Other than having a main page that reflects the goals of your business, you'll want to make sure you tackle these important tasks:
Determine what your blog categories will be early on
Too often, content creators start creating content without a plan. ✏️
Then they look back on all of their blog content and they can't determine any clear connections between the posts. This makes it hard to engage readers further, and it could impact SEO.
Your best bet is to proactively determine what sort of content categories you'll be putting posts into. The benefit of this is that you stay focused and you can later make a long-form SEO pillar post for each category that links to all posts within that category.
SEO optimize each blog post
Webflow has all of the important SEO fields that you need:
- SEO Title
- Title Tag
- Meta Description
If you're a StoryChief user, then the SEO data that you enter in StoryChief will automatically transfer into Webflow when you schedule posts for publication.
Promote your blog posts on multiple channels
You want people to actually read your content, right? Of course you do! Whether you create content to build an audience (and generate ad revenue) or you're attracting prospects and leads to your business, it's imperative that your content actually gets read. Don't make the mistake of leaving your content on your blog.
You need to promote it across multiple channels, such as:
- Your email newsletter
- All of your active social media profiles
- Your Medium blog
- Personally share with your ambassadors and influencers
- Personally share with your colleagues and coworkers
With a growing list of integrations, StoryChief speeds up all of these must-do promotion tasks.
Make it easy to update your blog content across channels
Content updates can offer a big SEO boost. There are a lot of reasons why you may want to edit your content after it's been published: update it for accuracy, lengthen it to improve SEO, edit it to go for a different SEO keyphrase if the initial target keyphrase didn't position in the top 15 rankings after 60 days.
Whatever the reason, when you're engaged in multi channel publishing, the last thing you want is to login to a bunch of different platforms to edit your content. If you publish your Webflow blog using StoryChief, any edits you make will also be sent to relevant channels, such as Medium. Just like magic. ✨
Looking to streamline your blog distribution and promotion? Take a look at StoryChief, the only sloth we know who will promote your content while you're doing you.
