BigCommerce blogs offer numerous benefits — they are good for SEO, allowing you to attract more visitors to your site, and they provide you with more opportunities to promote your products, leading directly to more sales.
Of course, you will need to put in some time and effort to consistently create high quality content if you want maximize this marketing channel. Making your blog successful requires a steady stream of high-quality content.
Using templates will make it much easier to create all this content for your blog. In this guide, we’ll walk you through all the options for creating a BigCommerce blog template and help you choose the best approach for your particular needs.
Shogun provides a number of different templates you can use to quickly set up a new blog post for your BigCommerce store.
To access these templates, simply follow these steps:
There are a number of blog post templates to choose from on Shogun. The best template for your blog will depend on a number of different factors, such as the visual brand you’ve already established for your store and whether you want to add any extra features to your posts.
For example, BigCommerce stores in industries that prioritize professionalism, such as healthcare or industrial supplies, may want to choose one of the more clean, streamlined templates. Such a design will reflect that you take your work very seriously.
On the other hand, BigCommerce stores in industries that prioritize creativity, such as clothing or cosmetics, might prefer a template that’s more eye-catching and colorful. These designs are a great match for stores that have already established a loose and fun visual style.
Also, if you’re planning on promoting products in your blogs, some of the templates conveniently come with a featured products section already included. This will allow customers to add items to their cart directly from your blog posts.
Once you’ve chosen a template, all you need to do is swap out the placeholder text and images with your own content. You can also adjust the styling of each element on the page as well as add and remove any elements as needed.
If you don’t want to use one of the available templates, you don’t have to. Shogun also allows you to make your own blog post templates from scratch.
Selecting this option will open up a blank page in Shogun’s visual editor. There, you will find several tools that you can use to whip up your template, including the elements library, brand styles, and Shogun Insights.
The elements library is the cornerstone of Shogun’s visual editor. It includes dozens of pre-made features that you can add to the page with just a couple clicks.
There is a wide variety of customization options for each element, and you can use the visual editor’s grid tool to arrange the elements however you want on the page.
The different types of elements available include:
In addition to saving time, one of the main benefits of using templates is that it improves consistency, and you can use Shogun’s brand styles feature to improve consistency even more.
Indeed, this feature allows you to choose your own default fonts and colors for your headings and body text. If you had to configure these settings manually every time you made a BigCommerce blog template, there’s a good chance that you would sometimes mess up and use the wrong option on accident (picking the exact right color each time would be particularly tricky). The brand styles feature eliminates this risk completely.
After you finish the first draft of your BigCommerce blog template, you can check Shogun Insights to see if there are any improvements that you may be able to make.
This tool will grade your page according to four different metrics: accessibility, best practices, performance, and SEO. A score of 100 means no changes are needed. If the score isn’t perfect, Shogun will tell you exactly what’s wrong and how to fix it.
Here are a few of the potential issues that may be flagged by Shogun Insights:
Once you’ve achieved an overall score of 100 on Shogun Insights, you can be confident that your blog template is as good as it can be.
After you’re done making edits to the page, open the “…” menu in the top-right corner of the visual editor and select “Save as template”. You can also use this process to make optimized templates for product pages, landing pages, and any other type of page as well.
If you can’t find exactly what you’re looking for in the visual editor, you can always add your own options to the elements library with Shogun’s Custom Elements feature:
This tool is especially useful for development teams who are tasked with translating a mockup into a reusable template. The pre-made options available in the visual editor might not cover everything that your mockup designers come up with, but Custom Elements gives you complete control over the look and functionality of your blog post templates, right down to the last pixel.
Finally, it’s worth noting that you can use Shogun’s snippet feature to save even more time when creating your BigCommerce blog template.
You can turn any piece of content that you make in Shogun into a reusable snippet. In other words, you’ll be able to save sections of pages and reuse them on other pages.
This is helpful for when you need to create slightly different designs for certain types of blogs. For example, you may want to make separate templates for blogs announcing product launches and blogs about other company news — in this case, you can use snippets to quickly add all of the features that these two templates share, then use the elements library to create whatever else you need for each template.
You don’t need to take our word for it — Lyre’s is just one of the many BigCommerce brands that has successfully used Shogun to make their content creation process more efficient. Overall, they built over 680 pages with Shogun and saved over 100 hours of development time compared to their previous system.
With the help of Shogun’s templates, visual builder, snippets feature, and other powerful ecommerce tools, you should be able to see similar results for your store as well.
