Today I got this crazy urge to change up the way posts display on the index page of my blog. I thought that if they showed excerpts of posts rather than the entire post it could help my readers and I in a couple ways.
I understand the index page of my blog used to get a little long and all that scrolling can get those fingers fatigued. By using an excerpt of the post on the index page I can decrease that scrolling and keep your fingers happy.
Plus having just an excerpt show is a great way to decrease your bounce rate and increase your page views, because visitor’s have to click on an extra link to read the rest of the post. See >>>
I had been thinking about this for a while now and just recently a post over at Lobolinks called “Bounce Rate Part of the Google Quality Metric” had me thinking about it again.
I paid a visit to Balkhis to see how it could be done and found a great post on “How to Opitimize your Blog to Attract Readers“ which covered what I wanted to do. I even chatted with Syed for a few minutes online about it.
I logged into my admin and began to sort through the code when I thought to myself, maybe there is an easier way to do this. Maybe there is a plug in because I see that so many people have excerpts on their index pages.
So I was off to Wordpress to see if I could find a plug in. That is when I found a post on Customizing the Read More page which dealt with excerpts and more importantly quick tags. Here is a little snippet from that page.
The most commonly used method is to keep the_content() template tag and insert a quicktag called more into your post at your desired “cut-off” point.
The quicktags are the little buttons found above the editing window in your Administration > Write > Post SubPanel. They include bold, italic, links, and others, and the famous more. Put your cursor where you want to end the excerpted content of your post and click the more quicktag button. It will insert a code at that point that looks like this:
After spending the better part of an hour searching around I found out what I wanted to do could be accomplished by Wordpress with two simple clicks of the mouse.
I really thought about calling this post - The Equipment is Fine but the Driver? Sometimes those manuals might actually be a good thing to sit down and read. But hey, I am a guy so who needs them?
August 27th, 2008 at 5:52 pm
As a blogger I see why you would want to do this, but as a reader, It really bothers me when I have to click “more” or whatever to get to the next page to finish a post. I very often don’t bother to do it unless I’m very curious or want to comment. I don’t do it on my blog because I don’t want to annoy my readers.
If you have all very long posts it might be warranted, but very long posts are usually a turn off also. Sorry, I don’t mean to be so negative, just giving my point of view.
August 27th, 2008 at 6:00 pm
I understand your point of view Jennifer and I did think about it before I started to use the excerpts.
There were really two things that prompted me to make the change. The first was bounces on the blog. With all of the last ten posts visible the bounce rate was pretty high in the blog area.
The other reason was that the index page of the blog was very long. I display 10 posts there and I would have either had to cut that number back or shorten up the content displayed with excerpts to make the index page more manageable.
For those reasons I chose to use excerpts and I hope that most will find a single click to see the rest of the post a better option than having to scroll down a long index page.
August 28th, 2008 at 5:33 pm
Hmm… thanks. I’ve been thinking about doing this for a while but haven’t got around to it. I’ll give it a try, especially now that it sounds so easy. But… if you drop in one of those quick tags into your post… will it only affect the appearance on the index page? (it wouldn’t make sense if it showed an excerpt also on the “single post” page).
August 28th, 2008 at 5:35 pm
MoneyEnery I think you probably have your answer on that one as you had to go to the single post page to leave your comment.
The whole post shows through there.