Many of the themes in our Theme Showcase are great for writing and reading longer articles and stories, from our classic default themes — including Twenty Fourteen and Twenty Twelve — to popular personal blogging themes like Ryu and Manifest.
Last week, we shared ten of our favorite longreads across WordPress, and we hope you’ve taken some time to sit back and savor these longer pieces. Below, we’ve gathered some themes that work well with longform writing and offer a clean, enjoyable experience for your readers.
Syntax
On Otium, Yale PhD student Sarah Constantin writes about mathematics, cognitive science, philosophy, and more. Aside from a colorful graphic header image, Sarah keeps her blog simple. You can click on the button on the left to open the menu and access her About page, but the site is minimal, which keeps the focus on her prose.
On Syntax, you’ll find large, easy-to-read typography, and some nice touches for writers, like elegant displays of pullquotes:
As you can see on Sarah’s site, Syntax puts your writing in the spotlight.
Book Lite
Daniel Kay Hertz, a Chicago-based writer, discusses public policy and urban studies at City Notes. His site features a wide header image, fonts that are easy on the eyes, and a clutter-free, single-column look. He balances his text with visuals, and creates a pleasing reading experience.
Inspired by old-fashioned typography, Book Lite is clean and sophisticated, no matter how you customize it. Your widgets appear in your footer, keeping all of your extras in one place and allowing your writing to take center stage.
Duet
A notable feature of Duet, a premium theme, is its two-column layout, inspired by traditional print magazines. The design transforms your longer posts into professional pieces, which you can sample on The Squeaky Robot. Here, the Hanoi-based writer and traveler mixes images and text beautifully, seen on posts like “The Great Divide” as well as “A Single Story of Soviet Russia,” an archived favorite.
Another plus about Duet? It’s a solid theme for longform writers who produce as many photographs as they do words — you can set image and gallery post formats as well, which feature photographs proudly, as seen in these festival snapshots in Ba Vì National Park.
Other themes to consider:
- With Manifest, you’ve got a number of post formats to display different types of content, from status to gallery formats. But its standard post format is as clean as can be — perfect to tell your stories and publish commentaries, with no distractions. See it on blogs like Voiced Over and Idiot Joy Showland.
- Hemingway Rewritten, launched earlier this year, has quickly become a favorite among WordPress.com bloggers, with its parallax-scrolling header and bold yet sophisticated font choices. See it in action on Blog of the Courtier. The theme’s full-width page template offers even more real estate, in case you’d like to feature your best writing on static pages.
- A very stylized theme, Esquire might not be appropriate for everyone, but for those who do activate it, it’s often a perfect fit. Esquire‘s out-of-the-box accents — from the red drop cap to the yellow menu box on the left — look great on Jessica Lee’s blog, Road Essays, where she publishes travel nonfiction narrative.
Filed under: Themes, WordPress.com, Writing
I’ve stuck with Twenty-Thirteen for a while. Really like the combination of colour scheme, the single column layout, and the large featured images.
How about great themes for poets? We have some particular needs, such as single-spacing between lines (many themes have leading that is too large) and for lines to break in the exact way that we want. It helps to find a theme with a very large character width (right term? — the width of the space for text).
Right now, I’m using Ryu, which has a very clean look and a much wider space for text than my previous theme, which I believe was Pink Touch 2. One pet peeve: If I copy and paste from Word, it goes all crazy with a different font/point size, incorrect line breaks and spacing, etc. It’s not always convenient to either write the poem within WordPress or type it in after writing it in Word.
I would be glad to hear of any themes that are working well for other poet bloggers. Thanks!
I encourage poetry bloggers to share what they like about their current themes with you.
As for pasting from Word, you shouldn’t run into as many issues (see this related support note). But in general, to avoid weirdness, it’s best to write in a plain text editor first (like TextEdit or Notepad).
What are some great short form themes? Most of my posts are 500 words or less, and I can’t help but feel most themes have too much space for me! Thank you!
Hey, I would have tried one of the themes out but they have no sidebar. If you look at my blog, it would be good if you had a theme just like the Skeptical theme. Could you make more themes just like Skeptical theme? That will make me very happy. Thanks. :)
Cheri, are there any navigation tools within or that you can add to these or other WordPress themes like the one I use (Dynamic News) to help people quickly move to different sections in these longer articles? I saw a great example of a navigation tool here (http://www.dcrainmaker.com/2014/07/tuesday-tidbits-android.html#) I’d like to use with my longer pieces. If not available through a theme, is it possible to do this with CSS? Thanks.
It’s a good question, but hard to answer, as most of our themes are great for personal blogging. One feature you might want to use as a filter in the Theme Showcase is Post Formats, which will show the themes that offer a variety of formats based on the content (standard post, quote post, image post, etc.) The look offers a nice mix (I love the free McKinley theme, for example).
The premium Bloggy theme is a nice one as well (from personal experience, as I’m currently using it on one of my blogs).
I also love the simple, sophisticated look of Suits. Or the simple, minimal Flounder theme.
And some of the tumblelog themes might work for you, too: Sorbet, Quadra, and Circa.
Utlimately, though — remember that you can use and transform any theme to fit your needs. I don’t want to make it seem like X theme is only for X, and Y for Y, and so on. :)
Hi there — you’re right, for the most part, the themes featured in this post are sidebar-free, which allows the writing to be the focus, with no distractions.
If you’re interested in other themes with right sidebars like Skeptical, check this list: http://theme.wordpress.com/themes/features/right-sidebar/ (You can also narrow down that search even more, using the filters there in the Theme Showcase.)
Are there other features specific to Skeptical that you really like? And what’s missing from the theme that you’re looking for?
Hi Steve — the Page Jump tool is the most similar feature to the one you point out in that article. Elizabeth talks about it in this post on features for longform posts (it also mentions pagination as well, which is a related option though not quite what you’re looking for). You can see it in action on this page on our WordPress.com tutorial site, with the “table of contents” at the top, in the body of the post.
(On WordPress.com, we don’t have the exact navigation tool you point out, in which a pop-up box floats on the left.)
I’m not sure re: CSS. If you have specific custom CSS questions for Dynamic News, I recommend posting in that theme’s forum: http://premium-themes.forums.wordpress.com/forum/dynamic-news
Hope this helps!