Best Practices for Creating Unique Blog Posts

Recently here on [wp] I’ve been sharing little tips that will help create a unique look for individual blog posts. Today we’ll be rounding up the “best practices” for creating that unique look, the easy way.

Post templates

Getting rid of the sidebar is a simple way to expand your options. Were we using pages, it would be easy to get rid of the sidebar with a page template, but those don’t exist for posts, do they? Wrong. They do. You just need a plugin which gives you page-like options for choosing your post template:

<?php
/*
Single Post Template: Template Name
Description: This part is optional, but helpful for describing the Post Template
*/
?>

And then with some simple styling you can widen your content area and get rid of the sidebar, offering you more room to create an awesome post.

Multiple sidebars

Say you don’t want to get rid of the sidebar, but instead display a different sidebar. That’s easy if you do multiple sidebars the right way, which, of course, has the following syntax:

• Save new sidebars with the sidebar-name.php format.
• Use <?php get_sidebar(); ?> to display new sidebars: <?php get_sidebar('name'); ?>

You can then create a page template with your different combinations of sidebar and make that blog post just that bit more unique.