With Headway 3.6 finally out the door, it’s time to start taking a look at the new Design Editor and some of the options you can use with the Content Block. The content block has always had a lot of options, but with Headway 3.6 you can really start to take your designs to the next level. Let’s take a look at a couple of examples to see what some possibilities could be.

WooThemes – Hub

With Hub, you have something simple on the home page. You have a featured image, the title of the post, and the date. You get a little flair when you add the image of the author.

Theme Trust – Hayden

Hayden, a design I love for businesses, shows a perfect example of what most blogs look like. There’s the date on the left, title of the post, some post meta, followed by the image thumbnail, and then the excerpt of the post. It’s pretty simple, but it adds a little complexity with the date on the far left.

iThemes – Cohen

One of my favorite designs from iThemes, Cohen features a featured image as almost a background to the top of the post. Everything else (post meta, title) is there, but it really lays the content and the image out in a nice easy to digest way.

Studio Press – Modern Portfolio

Studio Press’ Modern Portfolio theme features a way to show off images as a photographer. This area really highlights two things, the featured image, and the title of the portfolio post.

Nathan Barry

Nathan Barry’s blog is one of my favorites, and sort of inspired me to redesign the home page of my site. Each post is in a box, with the featured image at the top, followed by a post title, date, and the excerpt of the post. He adds a little flair to the end of the excerpt by starting to gray out the last couple of lines.

Can the Content Block do this?

Are you skeptical? I sure was, but then I started designing a few of these and low and behold I was able to produce most of the features within each one. Of course I went ahead and created screencasts for each one! So over the next couple of days, we’re going to take a look at each one of these images and try and recreate it with Headway’s content block.

But wait, there’s more!

I truly believe that we can do just about anything with the content block. So I’m going to put out a challenge. I’m putting some final touches on my store (on this site) and will be releasing a new Headway Template called Balloon. I want to give someone a free copy of it. So here’s how to get it. Find me a blog layout you think cannot be done with Headway’s content block. The key here is that it has to be the content area only, not the sidebars, or something else on the page. I’ll then record myself trying to recreate the content area using the Content block. I can use the Live CSS editor if I must, but everything will be done in the Design Editor. There will be no child theme for this. If you can beat me, then you will win a copy of Balloon.