Good day, dear writers! My name is Nikolay and I am a senior designer in Scorum. Today I would like to share some pieces of advice about editing your posts on our website.
Well-designed text attracts attention, motivates readers and captivates your audience. Having given a little more time for designing text you will increase your audience, and, accordingly, the number of upvotes. Moreover, you will look like a professional in the eyes of your colleagues.
Images
If you want your post to stand out and attract more attention, do not forget to upload a picture conveying the essence of your post. The first picture will be displayed in a preview on the homepage. Having an interesting picture will increase the chances of the post being noticed.
In the editor, you can place pictures in three ways: by the width of the text, wider than the text and to the left of the text.
Advice. Use pictures with a resolution equal to or greater than 1000 pixels horizontally. So you will be sure that your picture is correctly displayed as a large card on the main page of the site.
Try not to place any text on your first picture. This function is performed by the header. In addition, any text in the picture can conflict visually with the title overlay of the big card on the home page.
As for image sources, there are several options: buy licensed photos from photostocks, or find free ones using Google, social networks and free photostocks (such as Unsplash, Pexels, Pixabay, etc.). But if you use a free picture, do not forget to mention the source.
To mention the source of the image, just write down the address of the site where you found it. It is not necessary to copy the entire URL from the address bar.
Pictures are great, but you should not forget about the text in your post. If you want to share photos or videos do not forget to write an interesting descriptive text to introduce readers to the content. A post without text is a bad post!
Only you, the writers, influence the way the Scorum site will look, the place where you tell your stories and enjoy the stories of others. Together we can make this place not only interesting but also attractive. Below I gave two examples of the layout of the home page. In the first version, the posts are not designed in the best way, some have no pictures, some have the title duplicated in the pictures, and some have only a title with no text inside the post.
In this example, the same content, but with better quality. We can agree that now the site looks more professional – like a serious media resource.
Intro (kicker)
Intro or a kicker is a short summary that is located between the title and body text. Use an intro to grab the attention of the readers, inducing them to read the main text.
At the moment, you can write your intro using an italic font. In the next release, we plan to add a new text style for intro. I think this will be a pleasant innovation for those who want to write elegantly and professionally.
Pull quotes
Monotonous text blocks tire readers. To give them a break, pull out the most interesting parts of the story and emphasize them. This is a good way to diversify the text, add accent points so that your eyes do not get bored.
Example of a frame:
Pull quotes is a short explanatory text, a quote or comment that is typed in a different font or allocated in a different typographical way. Traditionally used in newspaper layout.
To add a frame, select the text and click on the ❝ icon.
Header and sub-header inside the post
Use headings and sub-headings to create a visual hierarchy within the post. So the reader can easily navigate in your text. Nobody likes to read endless blocks of text, moreover, it demotivates readers to get acquainted with your history.
To create a header or sub-header, select the text and click T or т.
Do not write long headers in capital letters. This also applies to the body text. Text typed in uppercase letters is harder to read than the text typed in lowercase. This "salad from the capital" is considered a bad form in typography.
Another tip applies more to the body text. Use bold text within reason – do not apply it to whole paragraphs. Use it point-wise and only in those places that require special accentuation. Do not abuse such accents, since bold text breaks the brevity of the text and creates dark spots.
Advice. If you want to highlight the whole paragraph, use italics, this is the priority method of the font highlighting, which least disturbs the overall picture of the type.
Lists
A list is a very important element of text design. If you have a list, you can write all of its elements separated by a comma as a single line, but it's better to move each element to another line. It works perfectly in long and complex lists.
If the elements of the list are independent sentences, they are written with a capital letter and at the end of each element a period is put. In other cases, the list items begin with a lowercase letter and end with a comma or a semicolon (if the elements are long enough), and even more so if they contain punctuation characters. A period is placed at the end of the list.
You can draw up the lists in two ways:
- Numbered lists (press 1. then Space);
- Bulleted lists (press * or Hyphen then Space).
For each type, press Enter at the end of the line and go to the next item in the list. Numbered lists cannot be continued after a section break or between pictures.
Embedded content
Often I notice that the authors use screenshots of publications from different media (Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, etc.). There is an easier way to share content. Scorum uses an iframely service that allows you to embed content from many popular websites. For example, you want to embed a publication from Facebook. Just go to the publication page and copy the link from the address bar of the browser. Then in the editor, press + and select the <> icon, insert the link and press Enter. Done!
Hotkeys
Below I have listed hotkeys that will help speed up your work while writing a post in our editor:
- Bold: ⌘ + B (macOS), Ctrl + B (Windows).
- Italic font: ⌘ + I (macOS), Ctrl + I (Windows).
- Hyperlink: ⌘ + K (macOS), Ctrl + K (Windows).
In the future, we will try to expand this list.
I hope these tips will help you make your story even more bright and interesting. Currently, our team of designers at Scorum is working on improving the editor and we plan to add a few interesting innovations. We want to make the process of writing high-quality posts as simple as possible, pleasant and most importantly, convenient.
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