Many people choose WordPress as the platform for their blog. And there are lots of reasons why! WordPress is generally considered the best option for blogging because of the way it manages content and has structures like tags, categories, and archives to organize that content.
But you can’t just install WordPress and start writing and expect your blog to style itself! It’ll probably look just fine out of the box, but if you want to make your website stand out a little more, you’ll probably need to do a little bit of styling.
If you’re using a free WordPress theme, or one that has blog styling built in, you’ll probably already have some design added for you. However, if you don’t like something in the design, or if you want to change the colors or fonts, you could find yourself needed to use some CSS code to do that. Scary.
If you have Divi, you can use the visual builder to set up a template to style all of your blog posts at once. (You can also set different styles for different categories of posts, but that’s another task for another day.)
First of all, what’s the difference between a blog post and a blog roll?
While we’re here, let’s also make the distinction between a blog post and a blog roll.
A blog post is one single blog article, like this one that you are reading right now, called ‘How to Style Blog Posts in WordPress.’ You edit each one individually, and this is where you add your content (usually text and images, but sometimes video or other media). You can create blog posts with the visual builder, as well, but I recommend using the default editor instead. Unless you want to spend a ton of time styling each individual blog post separately, stick with the default editor on blog posts.
A blog roll is where your visitors can scroll through the titles and excerpts of all of your posts (or all of the posts of a certain category), like on this page. Usually a blog roll is not even set up as a post in WordPress, it’s set up as a page. Building a blog roll page is a whole other thing, and you can read about it here. Today we’re going to focus on styling our single blog post articles.
Let’s walk through how to style your blog posts on WordPress:
Build your own blog post template:
This will all be done in the Divi theme builder. From your WordPress admin dashboard, go to Divi > theme builder. Add a new template and check off ‘all posts.’ Then, click ‘create template.’
Once you hit ‘create template’, you’ll see a new template appear with a blank header, body, and footer.
You can create custom headers and footers for your blog posts if you like. But, it’s not necessary. If you leave those blank, the regular headers and footers for your site will show up on the blog pages as well. Usually, the header for your site is the part with the logo and menu on it. The footer is usually the little bar at the bottom that just has your copyright and maybe some other little notes.
To build the blog template, click ‘add custom body’ and then ‘build’ to get a blank slate. You can always upload premade sections on to this page, as well. Sometimes I’ll start by adding in sections that I’ve built on other pages of that same website, instead of using a premade template. If you’re building a more simple blog post template, that might work better, because you really won’t need all the extra parts that come in the premade templates.
Use a free, pre-made layout:
You can download a free, pre-made blog post for Divi and then edit it in the visual builder to match your styling. This is what I usually do when I’m building websites for my clients. It just saves some time because all the the content is already connected for you and you just have to do the styling. To get the template, just go to this link and add your email to download it for free.
Once you have the template, you can upload it in the Divi > theme builder. Click the up/ down arrows in the top right and then you can upload the file right there. This is one way to import premade templates and other pieces that can help you save time in building your website.
Once you upload the template, you’ll be able to edit it in the visual builder, just like any other page or post. I recommend starting by removing any sections or modules you know you don’t want or aren’t going to need. Next, I usually swap out all the colors to match the branding of the rest of the website. After that, I change the fonts to match the ones I’m using on the rest of the site. And voila! You have your own custom made blog post template. No one will ever know that you got a head start from a Divi template, because you changed the colors and fonts to match your own site.
What’s dynamic content, and how do I add it to my blog post template?
Okay, so dynamic content is the real magic of WordPress. In your blog post template, you can put in different parts and WordPress will automatically pull that part through. For example, if you put the ‘blog title’ in your template, then on every single blog post, WordPress will pull the title and put it in that spot. You can do this with headings, featured images, even meta data (things like author, date, categories, etc.). Whatever dynamic content you add to the template, WordPress will pull that content from your blog post, style it the way you styled the template, and display it on each individual blog post. Work smarter, not harder!
NOTE: In order to use the blog post template, make sure all your posts are built in the default editor. If you use the Divi visual builder on specific blog posts, that design will override the template design. So just make sure to type the posts in the default post editor so you don’t have duplicate designs that will conflict with each other.
