Building an Online Home: A Food Writer’s Magazine-Inspired Website

With hundreds of themes on WordPress.com, writers have many options to build their online hub. We love the magazine-style website of food writer Emily Contois, which showcases her archive of work.

emily-contois-top-of-homepage — The online home of Emily Contois.

A PhD candidate and editor-in-chief at Graduate Journal of Food Studies, Emily explores the connections between food, nutrition, public health, and identity in popular culture and the everyday American experience. She’s pretty prolific: scroll down her beautifully configured front page to see her breadth of work.

Looking for more ideas to promote your work? Learn to drive traffic to your archives and repurpose your evergreen content.

While a traditional blog layout presents most recent posts first, Emily’s versatile theme, Zuki, lets her display more writing within her archives in a magazine-style design. Ideal for evergreen posts, popular reads, and multiple categories, the layout showcases her best work all at once.

mag-layout — A front page controlled by widgets: a big featured post, followed by a section that showcases her most popular posts.

Browse more magazine themes, free and premium, in the Theme Showcase.

Emily selected Zuki for two reasons: “First, it’s visually stunning. It has the look and feel I wanted: a lovely balance of images and text with a modern, clean vibe. Second, I’d been blogging for five years and had generated a lot of content. Its magazine-style front page allows me to curate my writing and feature more of it on the homepage.”

Its magazine-style front page allows me to curate my writing and feature more of it on the homepage.

Visitors can immediately learn more about her through the featured About post at the top and also get a sense of her food writing and academic work in food studies by scanning the rest of the front page. “My homepage also features thematic groups of posts, like food and gender (one of the main themes of my research), food history, my most recent posts on a variety of topics (like reads for #NationalCookbookMonth), and some of my most-read posts (like my history of Dunkin’ Donuts).” She also uses sidebar widgets to make a variety of academic resources available, such as resources for applying to graduate school and publishing in the field of food studies.

Using various front-page widgets and featured categories (“Gender,” “Academia,” “Popular”), Emily organizes and highlights her work exactly how she wants. If you use categories meticulously and have a growing archive of writing that you’d like to show off, browse Emily’s website for more inspiration.

Love this look? See Zuki in action on other sites, like the websites of writers Shivya Nath and Cody Delistraty. Then, try it for yourself.