Since you’re here, I’m guessing there’s a fashion or lifestyle blog sitting in you somewhere. You know that you could share something awesome with the world, but you’re missing a tool to do so … hence, a WordPress blog!
Blogs are perfect when it comes to expressing your opinions and building a relationship with your (soon-to-be) audience.
So where to start?
Well, there are some specifics you should know before setting out to build your first fashion or lifestyle blog. To help you out, here’s our list of the 4 things to consider when building a fashion and lifestyle blog on WordPress:
1. What makes a quality fashion / lifestyle blog?
First, let’s think about the reason why you want to launch a fashion or lifestyle blog. Right up front, let’s make it clear that all reasons are valid and there’s no bad answer here. However, some of the most popular goals for fashion / lifestyle blogs include:
- spreading your personal brand,
- building your expertise in a specific fashion- and lifestyle-related niche,
- promoting a clothing line / cosmetics / etc.,
- or … no goal at all … you can have a fashion and lifestyle blog purely as a hobby.
What is incredibly important, however, are two things:
- Regardless of your goals, make sure that your fashion and lifestyle blog resonates well with your audience. Above all else, you need to establish a connection of some kind with them. It’s your interaction with the audience that’s going to make your fashion or lifestyle blog successful.
- Your blog needs to be different from everyone else’s. No matter what design you choose, or the content you publish, your personality needs to show through. The thing is that there’s a whole crowd of fashion and lifestyle bloggers out there already, and the only way anyone is going to pay attention to you is if you manage to stand out from that crowd somehow.
2. What’s the perfect design for your fashion / lifestyle blog?
In a sentence, fashion and lifestyle blogs need to be fun! Otherwise, how else are you going to convince your audience to keep coming back? “Come check out my boring lifestyle and my boring blog design” won’t strike a chord with many people…
Therefore, here’s what a quality fashion and lifestyle blog design can be characterized by:
- It needs to follow the trends. Sorry, but there’s just no way around this one. While a fashion blogger writes about the trends in fashion, their website can’t stick out like a sore thumb by using a design that’s from the last decade. Go with the design that’s this year’s freshest look.
- Minimalism pays. Having the above in mind – following the trends – it’s worth pointing out that minimal designs tend to work well for blogs that feature a lot of visual content (which fashion and lifestyle blogs usually do). The thing is that with your design being too fancy, it will take all the attention from your actual content, and thus have a bad impact on your branding.
- It needs to be brandable. When it comes to fashion and lifestyle, your brand is everything. Therefore, your WordPress theme should allow you to include your branding elements, such as your logo, background pictures, and social media streams/links.
- It needs to be optimized for mobile. Nowadays, people consume most of their online media on mobile devices, and even more so in niches such as fashion. For example, it will be common for your audience to visit your blog directly after seeing a photo of yours on Instagram. And when they do, they will be very displeased if what they get is not compatible with their mobile device.
- You can try a popular Tumblr-like or Pinterest-like design. If you just want a solution fast, you can go for a tried out design style – that of Pinterest or Tumblr, often called the masonry design. Here’s an example by one of our themes.
3. What features you need on a fashion and lifestyle blog
Here’s a set of features that you’re going to find very handy on your fashion or lifestyle blog:
- Good social media integration. You need to make your fashion and lifestyle blog fully integrated with Instagram and Twitter (more on that in a minute).
- Custom types of blog posts. A fashion or lifestyle blog’s content is usually very diverse and features a lot of different elements, such as various multi-media, text, pictures, quotes, videos. All of that should be showcased effectively. Either your WordPress themes should handle this on its own (like this one), or you can take advantage of one of many WordPress plugins available on the market.
- Photo galleries. Pictures tend to play an important role on most fashion and lifestyle blogs out there. Whether it’s your latest stylization that you want to show, or some pictures from the latest event, you need good-looking galleries to handle that. In case your WordPress theme doesn’t give you any galleries then you can try out a plugin like NextGEN Gallery.
- Modular homepage. The keyword here isn’t even the page’s modularity, but it’s you being able to configure and adjust the homepage on your own. Pick a WordPress theme that allows you to do so – either through the Live Customizer or good widget areas structure.
- Multiple color schemes to choose from. Changing the color scheme of your site is perhaps the easiest way to make it stand apart from everything else that’s out there. Make sure that your WordPress theme allows you to do so (example).
4. Social media integration
When it comes to a fashion/lifestyle blog and social media integration, Instagram is your best friend.
Your second best friend(s)? That’s Twitter and Snapchat. But let’s start with Instagram.
So, there are a couple of ways in which you can integrate your fashion or lifestyle blog with Instagram:
- First of all, you can display a link to your Instagram profile in the sidebar of your blog, along with a quick message encouraging people to follow you. This you can usually do in any theme, just by using a widget.
- More importantly, you should have your whole Instagram feed showcased somewhere on your blog. The most common placement for this is the sidebar, but you can put it on the homepage as well. The two solutions you have here are, again, your theme’s own abilities, or a plugin aptly called Instagram Feed.
For Twitter and Snapchat, make sure to provide a way for your audience to follow you directly from your site.
- You can get a follow button straight from Twitter.com.
- For Snapchat, all you need to do is display your personal Snapcode somewhere in your sidebar. Snapcodes are a very handy tool. All it takes for your audience to follow you is to point their Snapchat camera at your Snapcode.
What’s your take?
That’s it for our four cents on the topic. But what’s your take here? Are you building a new fashion or lifestyle blog? Can we help you with anything?
