8 Plugins to Help Beautify Your Blog Content

8 Plugins to Help Beautify Your Blog Content

Are you bored with the way your content looks on your blog, or are you just looking to add a little flair? Sure you can do some tweaking to your theme, but you’ll need at least a little bit of coding knowledge for that. You’ll also need some extra time in case you may need to do some trial and error before getting things perfect.

So what happens if you don’t have any coding knowledge, or you just don’t feel like digging into the code of your theme? Well, if you’re looking for a quicker and more convenient way to tweak your blog’s content (or you just want to add a little extra styling to your text), I’m going to share a few WordPress plugins that can help you with that.

Category Icons

Category Icons WordPress Plugin

This plugin is great for displaying one or more icons in front of your post titles – or anywhere else you’d like. Although you can’t add individual icons to each title with this plugin, you can add specific icons for each of your categories and display them in front of each post title. It’s still a great way to really make each of your titles stand out, and gives your readers a general idea of what your posts are about.

Initial Letter

Initial Letter WordPress Plugin

With Initial Letter you can add styling to the first letter of each post, or the first letter of each paragraph in all of your posts. You can change the size, color, and font type for paragraphs within the .post and .entry-content classes.

Drop Cap Shortcode

Drop Cap Shortcode WordPress Plugin

Similar to Initial Letter, this plugin lets you change the first letter in each of your paragraphs (or just the paragraphs that you choose) to a drop cap. It’s extremely easy to use: just add brackets ( [l]ike this ) around the letters that you want to style.

WP Google Fonts

WP Google Fonts WP Plugin

If you’re looking to beautify your entire post (headings, blockquotes, paragraphs, lists), then you’ll love WP Google Fonts. It’s an extremely easy way to make your content stand out, by using fonts from the Google Font Directory within your WordPress theme. Your text doesn’t have to be boring, thanks to Google Fonts you can really liven it up.

Simple Pull Quote

Simple Pull Quote WordPress Plugin

If you use the blockquote button a lot (to quote text), then you’ll really appreciate the Simple Pull Quote plugin. It’s lets you easily insert pull quotes into your posts and pages in a clean, yet stylish way. Don’t just indent your quoted text, with this plugin you can pull it to the side of your text and put a spotlight on it. Of course, if you’re great with CSS, you can also add a little more style to it as well.

Featured Video Plus

Featured Video Plus WordPress Plugin

If you’re looking to make your content more engaging, why not replace the featured image with a Featured Video? This plugin lets you use a video in place of the featured image and currently supports: Local Media, YouTube, Vimeo, and Dailymotion. If your blog is already using the Featured Image feature, this plugin can override that and replace it with an area to upload a Featured Video instead.

Special Text Boxes

Special Text Boxes WordPress Plugin

Many WordPress themes now come with shortcodes that you can use to highlight specific portions of your text.  If your theme doesn’t support shortcodes like these, this plugin is a great way to compensate for that. You can use it to add all types of colored boxes to your content like warnings, alerts, information, downloads, etc. (as seen in the screenshot above).

Text Hover

Text Hover WordPress Plugin

Text Hover adds a very useful feature to your text: hover text for words and phrases that may need some clarification. Maybe you want to provide further explanation of a name, term, acronym, etc.; this plugin will help do that using a simple format within your text (i.e. WP => WordPress). When readers hover their mouse over a defined hover term, they’ll see the specified text description in an alt text-like pop-up.

What Do You Use?

How do you enhance the content on your blog? Do you use any manual tweaks or WordPress plugins to help you beautiful your text and/or images?

Charnita Fance

Charnita is a part-time freelance writer and blogger, and the owner of Social Web Tools. As an early adopter, she enjoys trying out new social media and Internet tools along with WordPress plugins and Web apps. You can find her at various social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and Google+

12 Comments

  1. ashish

    I am searching a plugin for particular text (like -introduction) in image box. please suggest me any plugin. Thanks in advance.

  2. andry

    list plugin will be very helpful to improve my website.
    Perhaps if there was a time I would try to install the plugin.

    are there other plugins to help my web make beautify website ?

    thanks

  3. jenny

    nice post Charnita !!

  4. Akash Gurnani

    Great Article Old but Very Helpful.

  5. Alfonso

    Great post!
    If I may, I want to offer the list above with mouseover plugin. I’m using it to show my books and really love it! and it’s free!! http://wordpress.org/plugins/mouseover-free/

    I’m not selling and not affiliate with this plugin – just downloaded and want to share.

    Enjoy!
    Alf

  6. Joseph L. Lindsey

    Awesome…!!! Charnita Fance, i am not good at coding , such blogs helps us a lot to make our blogs more beautiful and gorgeous. I loved following three Plugins
    Initial Letter
    WP Google Fonts
    Special Text Boxes
    and will utilize in my blog because i love colors and fancy text and text boxes.

  7. Sriniwas

    Nice Charnita…. Special Text Boxes plugin is just awesome….

  8. Sai sandeep

    That was Awesome, I am going to use Featured video plugin.
    Great post 🙂

  9. Pranjal

    I am fond of Dropcaps and tooltips, while the featured video sounds something really exciting. I should give it a try!

  10. Jacob Coverstone

    This was a fantastic list. I’ve been looking for a drop cap plugin, and actually installed 3 others from this list. Thank you.
    J

  11. Mikkel Breum

    For web fonts also take a look at the “Typecase Web Fonts” plugin in the wordpress.org repo, it is very pleasing to work with.

  12. Harsh Agrawal

    That’s a handy list Charnita…
    I like the idea of initial letter..and since I use Thesis, I use note and alert to make the heading standout..
    Could you also do a post on plugins to help increase CTR to outbound links… Something like action plugins….

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