Substack: Designing Your Publication Home Page.

Of Heros, Features, Magazines, and Newspapers.

Photo by Mateusz Wacławek on Unsplash

Substack treats your publication home page like a website. Similar to WordPress themes or your website design, you can customize your layout and style within preset parameters for your home page, welcome page, user emails and posts.

Navigate Dashboard→Settings→Basics to get to ‘Site Design,’ and select Customize.

You can choose to customize:

1. Layout: Feature, Magazine, Newspaper

2. Style (Fonts, Colors)

Consider the idea of a folded newspaper on the newsstands. Whatever is visible is considered ‘above the fold,’ and anything hidden is ‘below the fold.’ The same principle applies to website design layouts, for the most part. The decision is simple for your publication as the controls are preset, and depending on your content you can choose different layouts as I explain below. A video showing you how to make these changes is also at the end of this post.

Above the Fold Layout Options: Feature, Magazine, Newspaper

1. Feature: Ideal for highlighting a single, impactful post. This layout is perfect for making a bold statement as soon as readers land on your page. The current layout for this publication is set to Feature with a specific pinned¹ post - see below image. You can see the divider line that indicates the above the fold line. Many popular websites use the featured post approach.

Before we check other layout options, it is helpful to understand the notion of a 'hero' post. A hero post is essentially a pinned post—it could serve as an introduction, a personal message to your readers, or even your most engaging post. Any post will work depending on your intent. Simply select the desired post and 'Pin' it to make it the focal point of your layout. You can change this at any time.

Optional: Enabling ‘Top Posts’ shows the highest engagement-driven posts above the fold as well. This option is only available with the Feature/Magazine layouts. See below.

2. Magazine: Optimal for showcasing your top five posts with striking visuals, creating an immersive and slow-read experience, reminiscent of flipping through a magazine. For the best five posts² with striking visuals and a centered post that draws the user in, choose Magazine. See my other publication’s example below.

With optional ‘Top Posts’ enabled:

3. Newspaper: Choose this layout if you have a plethora of interesting posts and want to offer users a diverse selection, with a focus on the most popular ones in the rightmost column. You can showcase 8 posts in this layout above the fold. Even now, newspapers use this form of layout online and in print.

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Below the Fold Layout Options

These choices are much simpler! Choose from 'List,' 'Grid,' and 'Group By Tags/Sections' based on your content and navigational preferences.

The rightmost column of the 'below the fold' design is reserved for your publication details, the subscribe button, and recommendations. Here are additional customization options for this section.

1. List: Does exactly what the name suggests. Optionally, you can turn off images though I would not recommend it.

   

   List view, with images (left), without images (right).

2. Grid: Offers a better visual representation of your stories. Recommended for starters due to its user-friendly layout.

   

3. Group By Tags/Sections: Groups similar content together and lets you reorder the grouped sections/tags. If you already have tags on the navigational bar, this might lead to redundancy. (Read content organization strategies for more info). For example, the tag ‘Ancient India’ is already on the navigation bar. Also, posts can be duplicated (as below) because the same posts may be tagged multiple ways, and unfortunately, there's currently no way to turn off duplication.

   

4. Style (Fonts, Colors): This is pretty self-explanatory, and you can set background colors, welcome page colors, and font colors and font styles for all the content. You can also choose different colors for the home and welcome page.

5. Before you finalize the layout and style themes, take advantage of the 'Preview' feature [See video below] to review all your user-facing content, including the home page, emails, and welcome page.

You can watch the steps demonstrated in the video below. Have fun experimenting whenever you get tired of the look!

Note: Changing the layout doesn’t affect any of your published posts or notify your subscribers - it is just a superficial change, so feel free to experiment!

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Was this useful? Please share your tips on how you decide on a home page layout. Feeling generous? You can buy me a coffee or a book!

1. You can select any post’s ‘…’ ellipsis menu and ‘Pin it,’ making it the featured or ‘centered’ hero post as shown below. When you want to change, just ‘Unpin’ it, and then ‘Pin’ the other one.

2. You can decide to exclude posts from above the fold as well. ‘Most Popular’ is decided by views, engagement and publishing date. Here’s more info.