CROWDSOURCE DESIGN UPDATE: Well, it looks like the winnner of my $2000 Web Design Giveaway will definitely be selected by a random drawing, but I still have yet to receive any substantial feedback about the “rules of entry.” If you have a great idea about what I should “charge” as the price of registration in the giveaway, please [intlink id="2447" type="post"]post your comment here[/intlink].
Today, we’re going to talk about blog post excerpts.
Whether you call it an excerpt, a pull quote, or a blogtacular neck of the woods, the result is the same: readers, either on your blog archives, in your RSS feed, or in search engine results, can get a quick taste of what you’ve tossed up for them and make an educated decision about what you wrote is what they want to read.
But, most of us (myself included on many days) are making a mess of our excerpts by being lazy—because we let our blogging software decide what that excerpt will be.
Let’s use my blogging style as an example. It’s, well, not exactly the pinnacle of good five-paragraph essay writing. I rarely get to the point in the first graf and almost never include the thesis statement in the first three to five sentences. In fact, I often use the first graf to give readers an update on something entirely unrelated to the post.
I used to play baseball as a kid, and when I got to stand on the pitcher’s mound, my throwing style was the same as my writing style—slow on the windup. Here’s my little league picture:
"I will melt upon the point when I'm good and ready."
Okay, I have a confession. I never played baseball; that photo was my mother’s idea.
But that’s exactly the point. Well, not exactly the point. Really, not even close to the point. But let me see if I can shove that chimp underneath a pile of rugby players and say something worth reading.
Ah, here we go: unless the first 250 characters of your blog post also happen to be where you always give a great hook or synopsis, you’re misleading your readers, possibly disappointing them, and probably losing the the new ones before they even give your post a chance.
In terms of design, excerpts organize your content, allow you to display more posts within the same space, and speed up loading times because only thumbnail images are displayed. Perhaps more importantly, for those who wish to blog professionally, the use of excerpts in blog design encourages more pageviews, because readers must click on each excerpt to get to the full enchilada, er, post. Yes, some blogging mucky-mucks claim that each additional click needed to get to the enchilada creates a 50/50 chance that a reader will decide to have a corned beef sandwich instead, but I believe a well-crafted excerpt improves those odds to better than chance.
So, for today’s poll, I’m letting all of you decide whether you love excerpts on a blog, hate them, or prefer a hybrid of the both. Here are three common options:
"No, I am not a DNA analysis."
So, without further ado, here’s today’s poll:
Think all this excerpt talk is hooey? Did you show up here hoping to get a glimpse at a chimp in a baseball outfit? Leave a comment and share.
I’ve never thought about the concept of blog excerpts before. Now, I want to figure out how to do it. As a reader, I like option 2 the best because I’ve been teased to read a post and I want to read it pronto. I don’t want to be frustrated with finding the link to read the rest. If I like the blogger’s take, I don’t mind clicking the earlier posts. And, I would have more posts to pick and choose to read.
Well, I definitely think that a URL that leads to a particular post should give the full text of that post, no matter what. I was talking primarily about the homepage—but your reasoning remains valid!
I like having the full article, at least up to the more tag on each of the articles on the front page, I think that is kinda blog style. Anything else is like magazine style, just my opinion…
I have been using excerpts. I love them. They have to be well written, though. Now if only all of my co-contributors would do it …
I always wandered what the official name of those were called. Thank you #blog2010 for sending you my way! Do you have a tutorial on how to set those up? I use blogger and have not seen an option for it, but I’m fairly handy at manipulating html to make it fit.
thanks in advance!
Heather, unfortunately, I don’t. And more unfortunately, Blogger is seriously limited in this department—you can really only use the first paragraph (or some introductory text) as an excerpt.
Still, it can still be a good thing for organizing your blog. Here’s a tutorial from Google:
http://www.google.com/support/blogger/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=154172
I get the point of the excerpts, but when I visit a forum I want to sink my teeth into, the excerpt blogs feel too much like a news aggregator’s site…
Ack! It’s a tie again!