Shaping a Blog Design for Thought Leadership

Here’s another example. We can highlight passages with access to a six-color palette. It’s the type of functionality that one associates with a branded online magazine. Of course, a branded online magazine benefits from an art department filled with people who read the Pantone guide for fun.

Which brings me to an equally important point. The new blog needed the tools in the WordPress console to support the unique functionality so that this quest for high-octane design in each post could be a repeatable process (not require design expertise and/or custom programming).

In the Agency’s use of storytelling techniques in content development, we talk about levity as a “killer app” to gain attention, especially for B2B clients. So too in the blog design, I wanted to bring touches of levity such as the use of bullet points … literally.

• Bullet one
• Bullet two
• Bullet three

As we got deeper into the plan for the site structure and design, it became clear that the job called for custom programming. While today’s WordPress themes/templates can deliver Condé Nast-like sophistication, we needed more than a pretty face.

The blog has always probed this intersection where storytelling, digital, content marketing, paid media, journalism and branding as well as traditional PR all converge. Hopefully, between the new design and content architecture, the blog can also serve as industry resource. Yes, we’ve implemented industry best practices, bucketing over 600 posts into 37 categories. But the content architecture also pulls out stand-alone sections, again with a unique design such as one dedicated to visual storytelling.

All this and more did take some time.

Before closing the curtain on this post, a few bows are in order. Our extraordinary creative director, Chauncey Hill, tolerated my email pings — Hey, this is really cool. What do you think?  – somehow distilling my input into the design you see today. The contribution of Lars Faye at Chee Studio went far beyond the custom code. And the project’s SEO team of Chris De Sa and Melissa Lewelling did an amazing job in tuning the cobbler’s kids for the Google algorithm.

One final comment —

I’ve always viewed this blog as a laboratory for communication experiments. As our client campaigns increasingly integrate earned media and owned media, we can test stuff here. No doubt, what we’ve learned from this redesign will show up in future client campaigns.

In the meantime, we value your input. If something doesn’t work for you, please let us know. If a piece of functionality simply doesn’t work, let us know that too. While we tested the new blog design before going live, I’m sure we’ll still be squeezing bugs out of the platform for a week or two (or three).

With the heavy lifting done, we don’t plan to wait three years before conducting another design experiment.