Gone are those days, when reading was limited to books, newspaper and journals. In 2020, newspapers have been replaced by E-News, E-Books on Kindle and E-libraries. Online content is very different from offline writing, here a lot of things are taken into consideration. You can’t just pile up your ideas and present them to the audience. You will have to make sure that the article gains user engagement once it is on the screen. So for that, it is very important that the content is well presented, and the message you wish to convey reaches easily to the reader. Thus, in this blog, we will be discussing the importance of graphics created by graphic designers and formatting techniques holds for online content.

• How is formatting important for Online Content
• Importance of Graphics in Blogs
• Tips for article/blog formatting
• The Bottom Line

Importance of Formatting Online Content

There is a lot of hype about “proper formatting” of the articles and blogs. Even when I was new to online writing, this formatting thing puzzled me a lot! So, let’s first start with what actually Formatting means? Formatting is not rocket science, it is just writing well-structured and good content. The content must be free from punctuation or grammatical errors; the ideas must be presented in a more compact yet informative way. For example, the educational blogs provided on Exambazaar website have a diverse number of blogs ranging from career related blogs, to preparation blogs and coaching institution reviews, they all have a synced formatted with various writing flows.

Online Content demands a very good flow and structure within the articles. Why? There are obviously a lot of reasons for this but the major one that I consider worthy is, structuring and formatting make the content more engaging. See, the articles that are available online are hardly 4 5 minutes read. And it is very important that the user is glued to the content for those 5 minutes. This is made possible with properly formatted content. This also makes the content look pleasing and the points crisp and clear. Imagine two articles, one is full of spelling mistakes, punctuation mistakes, ill-placed sentences that make no sense. While a second article that is properly layered, ideas laid out consistently, sections divided by headings. Which one would you choose? The second one because you will be getting the information in a neater way. The user does not have that much time to solve the jigsaw puzzle and find the answer. If he doesn’t get the information within 10 seconds of the reading, he will switch. Therefore, proper formatting and well-organized content are so much stressed.

Importance of Graphics in Blogs

Images form a really crucial part of the process in generating a good article/blog. It connects the article with the user in a visual manner. It happens many times that while the scrolling process, the reader gets intimated by the cool graphics and thus is compelled to read the article. Graphics also add value to your content by making it user friendly. A study revealed that the articles which contain appropriate images have visitors 45% more than those articles, which are just piles of words.

It is very important that you choose images which have some relation to the topic you are presenting. Non-relevant graphics will add zero value to your content. Suppose you are talking about the growth of a company; you can use statistics to visually represent their growth through a graph or pie-chart. Apart from this, the second thing that should be kept in mind while choosing a certain image is its quality. The search engines are filled with zillions of images and photos but you cannot just paste any of them to your content. A good image is that which is high definition, is crisp and clear. Also, it should be free from any copyright.

Tips for Blog Formatting

Well, for all my readers who are new to this, I would like to shed some tips to make their content worthy from my experience:

• Make sure to read your content over and over again to catch minute mistakes. You can also take the help of any grammar correcting extension like Grammarly for finding errors.
• Do not forget to add an introductory and a closing paragraph for your blog.
• If your content allows, you can always use tables to depict information in a compact way.
• Try to use Heading and sub-headings, that will help in breaking a long text. Also, it will help the user in getting an idea of what you will be talking in that section.
• Try to highlight/under-line important words, sub-heading of the article.
• If you are spreading your ideas point wise, make sure to use pointers/bullets. This will help in giving a good flow to the article.
• Always add HD quality images after an important sub-heading. But make sure it depicts the idea you wish to share.
• Avoid using graphics which are not sharing anything common to your topic.
• You can add quotes by famous personalities to your article. This is a very old technique in writing to draw the attention of the reader.
• Use the basic SEO techniques to cut down the traffic of the search engine.

In the end, I would like to say that Formatting and Graphics form the back-bone of any content. These small things will help you in getting an edge over your competitors in this online world. If both of them are mixed in correct proportion with your ideas and words, then that could prove to be a winning recipe. So, incorporate all of the key tips and techniques in your writing and then see the magic.

We the team of Exambazaar, hope that this blog helps you understand the basics of blog formatting and its importance in the online digital world.