Medium Stories Outline 📓

2 min readOct 10, 2022

One stop shop for story creation

Formatting The Title And Subtitle

Title should be in Caps, for example: This Is A Title In Caps
The subtitle should be a plainly formatted sentence, for example: This is a regular sentence you would see in any article without any special formatting.

Always have an image at the top of your post to grab a reader’s attention.
The image should be landscape so that when first viewing your story (article) they see content “above the fold” and not just your image.
Always have ‘Alt text’ on your images. I’m not sure if this matters for ranking but it helps the visually impaired screen read your content so be a good digital citizen and always use alt tags for images.
Always attribute images. Regardless if you get your images from a place like Unsplash and Pexels or create your own images. Everything needs to attributed! If you took the picture have a caption that says “Taken by the author”.
Try to use unsplash images sparingly as Medium has integrated their use so too many articles will have repeat images. Keep Medium fresh with new images.
When reading some of the Medium help articles, images seemed to be 720x376 pixels so that is the size of my images.
Make sure to set the “focus” on your images so when Medium generates the thumbnail doesn’t get a weird crop. You can tell Medium where the focal point of your image is by editing a story, selecting the image by left-clicking on it, then hold down the ‘alt’ key on Windows and left click where the focus on the image should be.

Structure is your friend, tables, graphs, well formatted paragraphs, etc..
Don’t be afraid to embed related media with the ‘embed’ option
Use “spacers”. The Medium provided formatting tool to give your content space when needed.
If your article is on the longer side you can use a Table of Contents to help your readers navigate the article. There are chrome/brave extensions that can handle the creation of a TOC for you.