Designing for text heavy pages

I’m creating a custom Wordpress theme right now that needs to be accessible and easy for its users. I’m confronting the matter of designing a pleasant-looking, text heavy page format. Some of the content that will be handled will contain lots of text and it poses two issues:

  1. I’m not sure on how to design for lots of text. Can anyone recommend any good examples they like or design suggestions?
  2. I’m not sure how to approach the backend of this wordpress site. If I create something with multiple columns and sections of text, I would need to either create shortcodes and custom fields. I question if this would make things more difficult for the users.

Any ideas or opinions?