Full posts or excerpts?
In an earlier post (Customising WordPress — a plan), I briefly discussed WordPress (the blogging software on which WildVista is hosted), and suggested that I was going to get out the pencil and paper, and start sketching out some design ideas. What’s actually happened, is that I’ve spent more time writing posts (probably no bad thing), and tweaking — oh OK then, playing with — various plugins, widgets, and my default theme.
One early decision was to change WordPress’s default behaviour for displaying posts on the front page. I’ve never really got on with the enormously long lists of full posts that make up the front page of many blogs. The pages can take an age to load, and it’s hard for a new reader to get a feeling for a particular blog when they have to scroll through masses of detailed content, rather than scan a list of post titles and excerpts.
Martin (over at Postcard from Timperley) commented that he’s not keen on having to click to ‘Read more’, and this got me thinking. The result is what you’re now seeing on the front page — a hybrid approach, displaying only the most recent post in full, and then the five most recent posts as excerpts with ‘Read more’ links. I achieved this with the Homepage Excerpts plugin for WordPress, available for download from the Daily Blog Tips site. However, I think the design decision is more interesting (and more important) than the mechanics of the implementation.
You can download the Homepage Excerpts plugin from www.dailyblogtips.com
Of utmost importance with any such design decision, is to keep in mind who you’re designing for — that is, the end user (visitors to your blog); not yourself! Given that blogs and blogging entered the mainstream some 10 years ago (blogger.com went live in August 1999), the medium has developed a number of tried and trusted design patterns, most of which will become obvious to anyone that’s a regular web user with even a passing interest in blogs.
As such, the question I needed to answer, was why so many blogs have extremely long front pages consisting of full posts, and whether this common design pattern is appropriate for my own blog.
As a quick piece of research, I took a quick look at each blog on Martin’s blogroll. Of the forty or so blogs listed, only two use excerpts on the front page, with all the rest favouring full posts, and consequently have very long front pages in many cases.
Most of these fit the ‘personal journal’ style of blog, and I can see how such a chronological diary is reasonably well presented as an extended page of full posts. I remained unconvinced that a blog consisting of often unrelated posts or mini-articles on a selection of subjects (the way WildVista is likely to go), without an implicit chronology, is well served by this approach.
The next step was to review others’ thoughts on this. Googling for “blog full posts vs excerpts” did the job. Once I’d sifted out all the hits that were about how to implement excerpted posts as opposed to why one might choose to do this, I could get a better understanding of the merits of each approach.
The following are links to relevant articles or posts, most of which have associated comments that are helpful. I’d recommend you take a look at these if you’re also wrestling with the ‘full posts or excerpts on my front page’ decision:
- Full Posts vs Partial Posts, on the Homepage (at Pro Blog Design)
- Full Posts or Excerpts on your Blog homepage? (at BlogCatalog)
- Full posts or excerpts? (at Upstart Blogger)
- Post excerpts on the Homepage? (at Daily Blog Tips)
- Daily Blog Tips Now Features Post Excerpts on the Homepage (also at Daily Blog Tips)
- Excellent Uses of Excerpts in Blog Design (Vandelay Design Blog)
It’s worth pointing out that I’m not at this point considering the benefits or otherwise of excerpting posts in RSS feeds, rather than on the front page of a blog. What commentary I’ve seen on this seems to come down pretty solidly on the side of not excerpting feeds, so I’ll double check what’s going on with my own RSS feeds later.
Reviewing the links I’ve presented, I guess I could be guilty of a degree of confirmation bias. Nonetheless, there are a number of points made in the linked articles and comments that have helped me decide on the hybrid approach I’ve taken for now:
- Length of posts — time will tell, but I’m not expecting to be posting any very short posts (500 words per post is what I’m aiming for currently as a minimum), nor posts that consist just of a photo or two. Such posts certainly have their place on personal ‘journal’ type blogs, but that’s not where I want to take WildVista. I’m not considering mobile blogging from ‘the road’ either. So, excerpting most posts on the front page feels like the right thing to do. If I feel the need to post smaller items at a higher frequency, there’s always Twitter…
- User expectations — blogs are ’supposed’ to consist of a front page of un-excerpted posts that users scroll through. The more I read, the more I’m convinced that this applies specifically to journal-type blogs that have a strong chronological thread, and probably a loyal and relatively small readership. For blogs presenting more in the way of standalone articles or featurettes (that probably don’t have a much of a chronological flow to them), excerpts will provide the scanability (and can offer ‘teasers’) that is much harder to achieve with a lengthy page of full posts.
- Clear signposting — if using excerpts, the signposting to ‘Read more’ needs to be very clear. As things currently stand on WildVista, I think this particular navigation item is too subtle, so I’ll be looking into restyling this.
- Scope for use of images/magazine-style excerpts — I really like the idea of producing graphically interesting excerpts, and perhaps even laying things out more like the contents page of a magazine-style site. I couldn’t consider doing this without excerpting.
There were a few other points that kept coming up, specifically, advantages of excerpts with search engine optimization (SEO), and increased click rates. Neither of these are a driving factor for me at the moment. As I stated earlier, I want to get the user experience right, and I think posting the latest post in full, with excerpts for the next five posts, will be an improvement.
What do you think? Full posts, excerpts, or a combination of both? And how strongly should this decision be based on the type of content on a blog?
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_b.png?x-id=3da86832-9d03-4e5e-896b-4d7e1c223497)
I pretty much agree with Martin (I esteem his blog highly) and mostly prefer full posts, but I think what works best depends on the type of blog and the style of the blogger. Highly technical? Roll ‘em. Ten a day? Roll ‘em. Generally long? Maybe roll ‘em, but many Postcards from Timperly are long, and I like them in full, just as they are. I think that’s because Martin is a really good writer and takes great pix, and I like the flow.
I admit I do also prefer excerpt-based blogs when the blogger is not an especially good writer or only occasionally covers topics I’m interested in…I can make a quick choice not to read more rather than carrying on to the bitter end out of habit. Not applicable to you!
That’s an interesting point, Mark, about preferring excerpts when the blog only occasionally covers topics of interest. I’ve been thinking more about categories recently, and how I can best use them. I’d love to be able to mark-up posts (perhaps with a title using a category-specific colour) automatically, based on the category.
If the categories were relatively few, well defined, and supported by a decent amount of content, I reckon that would be a good way to key readers in to subjects of particular interest where a blog covers multiple subjects. Something else to look into (perhaps there’s already a nice plugin for this?).
I’ve just regained my chair, somewhat embarrassingly flattered.
Paul, you will have discovered that I need to review my blogroll, adding some that definitely merit inclusion, and deleting a few that aren’t active.
Mark, your comments are, as always, a delight to read, especially as you set such a high standard yourself.
My first view, usually, of a new posting is via Google Reader – which actually just shows the first few lines of this posting, Paul. I quite often then click on the site in question (as now), but for those ‘long front pages’ I’m quite happy to use my judgement on whether to read every word or to scroll quickly down and move to the next item in ‘reader’. I think that knowing the author personally has as much to do with how attentive I am, as the quality of the writing.
Like your intention, Paul, my postings cover an array of subject matter, and the labeling system isn’t all that satisfactory, but it does basically work. One thing I have noticed is that readers will actually spend a considerable period of time on one label – usually a TGO Challenge, or the IBR, where I have meticulously indexed the postings and placed links at the foot of each posting, taking the reader to the next posting. Nobody has ever commented that this is helpful, but it obviously is.
I do have a plan to cover specific trips that others may enjoy, by setting up the blog to read chronologically. I’m still toying with using a standard web page for this, but the blog format has the big advantage of enabling comments to be made.
Time, of course, even for the retired, is a constant, sometimes nagging, enemy…
Good luck, Paul – remember to enjoy what for me has become an indulgence, and is actually mainly for my mum and a few close friends – all the other readers, some of whom have become good friends, are a bonus.
Thanks Martin — I’ve flicked a switch on my RSS feed so it should be displaying full posts now.