Wandering Thoughts archives

Some thoughts on blog front pages in the modern era

Once upon a time, the front page of your blog was how people read and followed it. This drove a great many features of the standard blog front page, things like the tropism towards showing full entries and paged navigation that let you go back to the previous N entries and so on. However, that was a very long time ago and things are almost certainly much different today.

I'm sure that some people still read blogs they follow through the front page (I'll admit that I do that for some blogs for assorted reasons). But I don't think that this is the dominant use any more. My standard belief is that most people come to most blogs through web searches, which will put them on individual entries. For people who follow your blog, I think that most will do so either by syndication feeds or by links from the social web. In this sort of environment, what's the purpose of your blog's front page? I can see at least two: it's where you point people for an overview of your blogging when they follow a link from a social web profile (or a GitHub profile or the like), and it's one of the top places people will look if they read an entry then decide they like your writing in general and want to see more of it.

What this suggests to me is that traditional front pages may be effectively obsolete and in need of being rethought for the modern era. For instance, I can imagine a front page that progressively shortens entries as you go along, with the first entry or two shown in full, the next few entries shown with significant excerpts, and then increasingly minimal entries for at least a few more. Perhaps you should also have a 'greatest hits' section afterwards (or as an explicit sidebar on the front page). I also suspect that there's no real point in paged navigation on the front page any more; instead you might as well end the front page with a link to your full archives. Your front page would still be a starting point for people reading your blog but it would be a different sort of starting point, one more oriented towards a first time (and one time) visitor.

(This uses ideas and practices from Peter Donis and Aristotle Pagaltzis that they mentioned in comments on this entry.)

Of course all of this is rambling theorization so far, uniformed by trying to do any real research. I'm sure that people have written plenty of things about design patterns for modern blogs and people may even have measured how traffic flows to various places on various sorts of blogs; if I was serious need to find out what's the current state of the art. As usual, I lack the motivation and energy for that sort of large scale design overhaul, among other things.

(That sort of a major redesign is edging close to a 'blow up the world' exercise for me and if I did that a whole lot of things would change, more because it implies a major rethink about how the blog operates than because it would require a major code change.)

One aspect of partial versus full entries on blog front pages

One of the eternal discussions and differences in blogging is whether your blog's front page has full entries or just some form of excerpts, with readers having to click through to read full entries. There are plenty of blogs that go either way and I expect that there are decent arguments for both positions. Wandering Thoughts is a full-entries blog for a very simple reason: I happen to think that full-entry blogs are simply easier, not at a technical level but at a writing level.

(One argument for partial-entry front pages I've read is the increasing rise of mobile devices and other things with relatively small screens. Partial-entry front pages give users of such devices a relatively compact overview of your writing without a wall of text effect. Similar logic may apply even on full sized displays if you write a lot of long entries.)

With a partial-entry blog, some portion of the front of your entry is effectively an abstract or a teaser for the full entry. You can't simply write whatever first sentence, paragraph, or whatever you normally would if you were simply writing a full entry; you need to always keep this additional usage in mind. I know that I've written any number of first paragraphs that would most emphatically not work as this sort of introductory teaser. For recent examples of what I'm talking about, the first paragraph of this entry would probably work fine but I'm pretty sure that the first paragraph of this one doesn't really.

(I'm picking the first paragraph here simply as a common division point and using it as an example. It's not required to always be this and in fact you probably want to customize the division point on an entry by entry basis rather than fit everything into the procrustean mold of a single teaser paragraph.)

I also don't think that good writing requires you to write first paragraphs that work this way. Sometimes you will be writing in a form where the first paragraph naturally frames your thesis or otherwise is a good introduction, but not always; there are perfectly good forms where this doesn't happen and you can't neatly slice off some reasonable amount of the front and having something that will draw people in. At the very least I believe that even if this way is arguably better writing it's neither clearly superior nor easy writing; you will be working harder to carefully craft the lead-in than you would be if you wrote the entry without having to consider this and you are probably not going to get a major overall quality payoff for it.

So the short version is that Wandering Thoughts has full entries on the front page because I don't want to make my writing that much harder by thinking about division points and standalone first paragraphs and so on when I'm writing entries.

(Of course real blog usability suggests that this whole issue may not matter too much. How many visitors even look at your front page anyways? (Perhaps I should generate stats for that someday.))