Feedback: Excerpts or Full Articles?
I’ve designed several different themes for WordPress over the past year or so and when it comes to putting content on the homepage, I always go back and forth several times as to whether or not I should include the full articles of my blog on the homepage or should I just display article excerpts instead?
Excerpts
As you can see from the homepage of Truebluetitan, I’m currently displaying excerpts of each article. Recently, my site design was analyzed for a college project and the students feedback was positive, however they expressed that they would like to see the full articles on my homepage, thus avoiding additional clicks.
I’m displaying excerpts on my homepage for two reasons. By displaying the article excerpts I’m able to display more topics on one page without having to scroll endlessly. Secondly, by using the excerpt feature of WordPress, I am able to include keyword rich content that I may not address in the article otherwise.
Full Articles
I can see the positives of displaying full articles on the homepage as well. By doing so, you enable users to view several of your articles consecutively without having to click into each of them and then click again to view another article. Additionally, the content on your homepage is increased, potentially increasing the possibility of that page ranking higher for important keywords.
What’s Your Opinion?
And so I’m reaching out to you: What ’s your preference? The majority rules here so speak your piece and we’ll see what the results are.
Excerpts for the reasons you mention and more!
If you’re dealing with a very technical topic, the excerpt, you can summarize it in laymans terms to help those who might have stumbled across your site to understand at a glance if that article is for them or not.
For those who want the real-estate advantages of excerpts, but not the duplication of content / effort, the tag for WP gives you that flexibility to include your intro paragraph. Well-written content should hook you in the first paragraph to know if you want to read the rest anyways right?
In my next refinement to my blog I’m going to experiment with multiple ways of presenting the content.
Main Page - one line summary in the excerpt
Category Page - tag to show the first paragraph or introduction, with a graphic or two.
Single Page - The full enchilada.
A follow-up question might be which do people prefer to see for RSS feeds?
I wouldn’t normally bother to comment on a blog where I have to click through to read it - I’m only doing it this time as it’s relevant to your question.
Having a number of blog sites that I own/manage, I understand the dilema of having to make the trade between more posts and more readbility. What I’ve started doing is defaulting to full article, then manually splitting longer articles using the ‘more’ functionality from Wordpress. I’m also playing with the idea of promoting longer articles to ‘pages’ and writing a short blog to point to them. That gives me the best of both worlds!
-John.
[…] month I asked you what you would like to see on the home page of Truebluetitan.com. At that time I was displaying […]
What ’s your preference?
I am okay with either, I guess. ;)
But for my own site, I slice the entries with the “more” tag so they show the first paragraph instead of the whole article. :)
The majority rules here so speak your piece and we’ll see what the results are.
As of now, I only see two (2) commented, so how? :p
Cheers! :D