Blog Front Page: Full posts or Teasers?

[TheDripp]

Originally Posted by EverythingEverywhere

The more I have to click, the greater the odds I wont bother clicking.

Make life easy for your readers. Put everything up front.

I know with WordPress for me, if you go to a category page or a search results page, you only get a article stub on those pages. You don't get a duplicate. The full article only appears on the front page and the actual article page.

EverythingEverywhere makes a great point from the book "Don't make me think" about how badly multi-billion dollar companies screw up their online businesses by either not adopting to the online world or worse, thinking they can cram the brick & mortar model into their online businesses.

Eric

[PaulR]

Avoid duplicate content and use excerpts.

Just my 2 cents.

Good luck

[Sfolega]

I think that full posts work much better than teasers. Web readers want quick information without having to click here and there for it.

Full feeds are always better in my opinion. People subscribe for a reason and often don't have time to click back to the site to read the rest of the post!

[RobinHaney]

I think that teasers are nice to put on the front page because then you can show more posts at once. I noticed that when I put up full posts i could only put around 3 on the main page. Now that I use teasers I can put up to 6. I find it gives the reader just a little bit more variety and maybe one will catch there eye and they will click on it.

As for RSS, I think that you should defiantly put full posts. RSS is meant to be convenient so why make people click to see a full post.

[trishacupra]

I prefer scanning through teasers because it makes it easier to find something interesting to read.

On my blog, if the post is short, I leave it full on the front page. If it's long, I use the 'more' tag.

[richrf]

Hi,

Depends on the nature of the layout and the size of the posts.

Right now, I am using full posts, but I keep my posts large enough to add some meat to the home page (for SEO reasons), but small enough that visitors will spend some time reading it. Very large posts are self-defeating. Most people (not I) prefer Newsweek to the Economist, the tabloid to the N.Y. Times, Fox to PBS. People just have very little discretionary time left in their lives.

Right now, I am thinking about going to a magazine format. This will allow me more freedom in what I want to post, and more items for a visitor to look at. If I do this, I will need to use teasers, just like any other newspaper format. Visitors, are going to want to scan quickly through the page looking for anything that they may be interested in. Of course, the teaser is going to have to be well written, if the visitor is going to spend the time to look further.

Rich

[Strongbow]

I prefer seeing the whole post on my own blogs and on others I may read.

[flashgordon]

I prefer full posts on the blog itself. I used to have teasers for my RSS, but many RSS directories and syndication places require full posts as well, so I've had to switch that over too.

[joespro]

Full posts for my blog, A New Band A Day(and the blogs I read) because if it's a blog that I view regularly - i.e., every day - I just want to see the new content and keep scrolling until I see something I've read before. But I can see why others prefer it layed out differently. Horses for courses I suppose.

[Skolor]

Definitely a teaser. Not only do you get a second page load, but you get a time on site, which is useful information.