Too Many Posts on My Blogs’ Frontpages
December 15th, 2007John Chow has recently asked the following question on his blog:
How many posts do you show on your blog’s front page and what is your reasoning behind it?
Much to my shame, I’ve realised that:
a) I’ve never paid too much attention to the number of posts displayed on my blogs’ homepages.
b) There’s no reasoning at all behind it.
I had already spent some time thinking about the subject, but I hadn’t come to any conclusions. Besides, I thought I had more important blogging decisions to make, so I kept on neglecting this matter.
Perhaps it’s time to think about it again. It may not be a major issue here, because most a1-fan-fun’s posts aren’t too long. But on Abaminds I tend to post longer articles. This habit may be affecting my visitors’ browsing experience somehow when they arrive to the frontpage. Hmmm…
December 15th, 2007 at 9:49 pm
Hi Karen - I think on my site I display seven posts on my front page.
Only the featured post is displayed in full and the rest are truncated using the ‘more’ plugin.
Kind regards,
Mark
Mark’s last blog post..Do You Know The Face Of Malaria?
December 15th, 2007 at 10:38 pm
Hello, Mark! Glad to see you commenting here!
Do you refer to the “more” tag that is available on WordPress’ built-in editor? Or are you talking about a specific plugin that cuts posts off? I’ve been thinking about installing one of those in my blogs. What do you think? Do readers get too annoyed when they have to scroll down a page?
January 1st, 2008 at 10:16 pm
I think generally, a rule of thumb to aim for in web design is no more than two or three times the height of whatever the average reader’s vertical resolution is set to on their monitor. With blogging, since it’s just text for the most part, maybe that can be stretched further a bit - especially now that so many users are on high speed access of some sort. So in my estimation, the thought that a blog with longer posts would have fewer blog posts than others on its front page makes a lot of sense.
Always good to be thinking about those things though - it’s all about the experience of the audience, after all.
Iain Hamp’s last blog post..Success a la Jobs
January 28th, 2008 at 11:12 am
I was wondering if you were able to get this issue resolved or not Karen… This issue has been on my mind for sometime but theres never any time
I have 5 full length posts on the home page and with frequency of posting going down for the last few weeks, I’m thinking of displaying on truncated posts - with ofcourse the last post as full post… I dont know which plugin to use for this though… any ideas?