These should probably still include a larger header font, but can also integrate photos, backgrounds, and even a bit of content, like a short summary of what will be covered in the section or a brief list of key points.

Including a table of contents at the beginning of your piece is a must when it’s over 3,000 words or is a guide-style piece. This feature gives users a quick snapshot of what they’ll get out of reading the piece (which is helpful for making scanners want to stay on your page), helps them navigate what otherwise would be an overwhelming amount of content, and makes it easy for folks looking for specific information to find it. Given that readers only engage an average of 2 minutes with longer documents like ebooks and whitepapers, you want to do anything you can to allow them to make the most of that time!

Using components, you can design various table of contents styles to work with your brand and content. Some might be better as a full-width block with a contrasting background at the top of an article page, whereas others would be better in the sidebar—you can even anchor it so it stays readily available no matter how far down the page your user has scrolled. You may want to have multiple tiers of headers to break up sections and subsections, or keep it as a simple list. Whatever you do, make sure to use anchor links to allow users to click directly to the section they want to read!

Your standard author bio or byline can so easily get lost in the midst of splashy content filling your page, but you want to make sure to highlight the talented people creating your content! According to Chris Gunnars of Search Facts, doing so can help improve how trustworthy your page looks, and NN/g explains that this is especially true if you’re working with an author who is well known among your audience.

Use components to design author bios that stand out. You might design a small element that goes in the sidebar with the author’s photo, name, short description, or links to their social—or create a full-width element to place at the bottom of your content with a background that stands out and more in-depth information about the person behind this piece of writing.

Sometimes you want to include a section of content that doesn’t quite fit within the rest of the flow. Maybe it’s an interview with valuable, relevant info that didn’t fit anywhere else, or a section digging in even deeper to a particular topic in the article.

You can use components to design these so they stand apart, making it easy for readers to understand that you’re straying a bit from the regular content so they can choose whether to dive in or easily skip the section and read on. Using a different background can be a great way to differentiate these, and you can design them to be full content width or as a card that runs beside your main content. Include images, different headers, icons, or whatever else you need to tell the story.

We all know how list-based articles, sometimes referred to as “listicles, ” took the web by storm several years ago, and their influence still lives on. There’s a good reason for that: Providing your readers with a predictable, logical structure improves content comprehension and makes it easier for a reader to scan and quickly understand the high-level information, choosing where they’d like to dig in deeper. Research has backed this up, showing that people more easily digest information when it’s broken into smaller pieces.

With components, you can make organizing your content into a list as easy as reading it. You can either create a separate block for each section of the list down the page—making it easy to ensure they are all uniform in structure and design for optimal scannability—or create a component for smaller lists within your content, which are a great way to break up the flow and call out important information.

Why are simple tables still so hard to build into content pages?! Too often publishers resort to creating a table in a spreadsheet or word processor then including a screenshot of that in their post—which creates a poor user experience because the text isn’t searchable, a poor design because the table isn’t responsive, and a poor publishing experience because it’s not easy to update the information in the table.

Instead, easily build styled tables directly into your article with the help of Setka Editor, which includes a table-building tool that makes these easy to create. Then, you can use components to save tables of the same style to use again and again without having to build them from scratch. These can be created as the most simple, streamlined table or designed with colorful backgrounds, custom fonts, and other elements to highlight your brand and make them feel integrated into the content. Include as many columns and rows as you need to share the information at hand.

Have a piece of information you really want to make sure the reader doesn’t miss? Creating a component to highlight that information in a separate, stylized box can be a great way to be sure it catches the eye, drawing their eye to the most relevant information and giving the reader maximum value for the minimum amount of work. Tips can also be used to provide additive information to help the reader take their learnings to the next level, without breaking the flow of your main text.

These can be designed to go in the side column or go between the text as a content-width box, and can be accentuated with icons, backgrounds, frames, and more. As a bonus, by designing these to provide some visual interest, they can break up the text as a reader scrolls down the page, ultimately improving engagement.

Similarly, sometimes it can be helpful to call out facts related to your story in a separate section. For instance, maybe it’s basic information that people should know before reading your article, but that can be skipped for people who are already knowledgeable on the subject. Or maybe the facts provide additional information that isn’t critical to the core of the piece, but could be interesting for someone who wants to dig in a little further.

You can create components to include this information in the sidebar or in another format that makes the information obvious without disrupting the flow of the main content.

components can make this easy by having all the fields in place for you to quickly fill this in. Include content like a photo of the expert, a short bio of their relevant experience, and links to learn more about them, designed to stand out without getting in the way.

Similar to expert profiles, providing a quick rundown of information about your company or a company mentioned in your article can be a great way to show credibility and build trust with readers, prevent the reader from having to search for the information themselves (and therefore leave your site), and make the company you’re featuring feel extra special. If you’re talking about your own company, this can even serve as a subtle CTA to help folks get even more excited about working with you.

Design these components to be as visual and scannable as possible, including numerical information about the company since readers’ eyes are drawn towards numbers, or using icons to create visual interest if there is no data to use.

Spoilers allow you to hide specific information within sentences, only showing it if the reader clicks a certain button requesting to see. If your information contains actual spoilers, hiding them like this can build trust with your reader because you aren’t ruining any information for them. But this feature can also be used to improve the reading experience by including bonus information for readers who want to dig deeper without cluttering up the page.

Unlike many components that are designed to stand out, these should be designed to subtly integrate into the text in a way that readers can easily find it but that doesn’t interrupt the flow of reading. Consider pop-up footnotes as an alternative for adding bonus information, especially when the information is long or doesn’t fit naturally within the main body text.

These can be designed with multiple images, custom backgrounds, fonts in various styles to convey different information, author pictures and profiles, a short summary of the article to come, or anything else that you think will make a user want to keep reading.

Think of this as an image “filter” but specifically for publishing. These can be designed for fun—like illustrative overlay designs that make images stand out—or for utility—like creating frames that look like a phone or computer interface to drop screenshots into. Make them whatever size and shape you need, and make a lot so you always have options to grab for whatever your need is.

A small bit of text below a splashy photo can so easily get lost—but you can use components to stylize photo captions so your reader is actually drawn to what they have to say. With components, you have the power to place your caption anywhere you want in relation to the photo, and include so much more than plain text. Doing this can also allow you to integrate your brand fonts, colors, or even illustrative elements to create small moments of reinforcing who you are.

Maybe this means layering the caption over the photo slightly in a stylized box, or placing it beneath the photo but with a background that stands out. Maybe your caption includes a small icon at the start to remind people that there’s text there. You might design different components for different use cases—for instance, one where the text is more obvious for when the information is critical to the flow of content, and one where it’s a little more subtle to use when the information is a sidebar.

Pull quotes have been standard in the publishing industry since print days, and for good reason—they’re such a good way to make your page more visually appealing while also highlighting some of the most compelling information in your article.

You can use components to make pull quotes you can quickly pop in wherever you want on your content pages, designing templates in various widths, fonts, sizes, color schemes, etc. Take your pull quotes to the next level design-wise with colorful backgrounds or eye-catching illustrations. You can even create quotes with additional context to up the credibility of the quote, adding the speaker’s photo, for instance, or including additional links or information to help give additional context.

Bulleted lists are a great way to break up blocks of text and draw the reader’s attention—according to eye tracking studies done by NN/g, one of the things that can pop out in a block of text and draw the eye of someone scanning the content of your page is bulleted lists. As a bonus, you can use components to make them even more powerful with the addition of icons or other imagery instead of plain old bullets.

These can be designed using images, custom illustrations, icons, or even just colorful shapes, you can make your visual element as small or large as you like, and you can set up the list to horizontal or vertical.

If you’re doing content marketing right, you should be inserting CTAs regularly—but in an article full of eye-catching images, animations, pull-quotes, data visualizations, and more, a subtle CTA is going to get overlooked. components make it easy to make these in a way that will seriously stand out.

Create as many different styles of CTAs as you tend to use. They can be designed to go in the side column, set up horizontally to place between content sections, or even stylized as immersive CTAs that span the full width of the page. Include text of different sizes, buttons, images, background colors, and more.

Including related links in the sidebar or towards the bottom of your article page can be a great way to up engagement, encourage further exploration on your site, and continue building a trusting relationship with a reader—but sometimes adding these to every article can feel like a chore.

Using components can make this a much easier task, allowing you to create templates for linking to multiple related articles or for highlighting one stand-out piece of additional content the reader might be interested in (like an ebook). You can put this element over a background to help it stand out, include images or buttons to make it more eye-catching, or even include a sample of the content to pique the reader’s interest.