What’s in Your Blog’s Style Guide?

What’s in your blog’s style guide? Do you even have one? You should. Creating one is easier than you think. We’ll give you helpful tips on how to create one in this blog post.

A style guide can help you make sure that your images, posts, and branding are all consistent. It will make your life easier!

Why a Blog Style Guide?

If you work with a team or a group of bloggers, this becomes even more important to make sure that everyone is on the same page. Be sure that everything is the same, your branding professional, even with multiple people creating images and posts.

First, plan to keep your style guide somewhere that is easily accessible to you. For the North Carolina Blogger Network, we keep it in our Google Drive, but we also have a copy saved as a .pdf and keep a copy on each of our desks. Having it in the cloud works well because we have a team that needs to access to the information from whatever device they’re working on whenever they’re working. It seems to be the easiest. This might not be your preferred place, but do consider that you are going to want to cut and paste code, colors, and fonts easily into your HTML and website. So try to go digital, if possible.

Other places to consider? Evernote, NotePad, phone apps, a Word or text document, or even a note on your website’s backend.

Second, make sure you are keeping the most important information at your fingertips.

Things to include in your Blog’s Style Guide:

• Font names
• Font sizes, and where they are used  (use a different size or an h1 for lists? include this information here!)
• Colors: get both the hex and the RGB codes
• Capitalization rules (how do you capitalize your blog post titles? your blog name?)
• Voice and tone: not only in your blog posts (do you use the 3rd person, 1st person, we/me/I?) but also for your social media
• Formatting rules for images: include size, font overlay guidelines, and any manipulations
• Size of your feature images (remember, these are the ones that Facebook will pull!)
• How you link back to and credit others
• A short summary of your website and/or your bio (easy to grab when others ask)
• Any major NOs you have
• Hashtags that you use and when

Other Things to Consider for Your Blog’s Style Guide

Also consider including things such as where you get your images if there are any icons you frequently use, any widget code you need to reference, grammatical nuances to capture, the size of your blog’s sidebar, stock responses to inquiries, and so on.

Honestly, there are no hard and fast rules for what a Style Guide should look like or what it should do. But remember that it’s there to help you be consistent, in charge, and efficient!

What Do You Say?

Have you created a style guide for your blog? Would you like to? Do you need help? We’d love to help you get started. Let us know in the comments below!