I need to vent!
I’m sick and tired of visiting blogs which have 1 post on their main page. I won’t name names, particularly given I’m being (fairly) good today, but I’m seeing this on blogs more and more lately…and I hate it.
Why?
Because if I’m visiting a blog for the first time, and I like the post I’m reading, I want to be able to (easily) read other posts on that blog. I don’t want to have to click through some crappy navigation options at the bottom to find other posts.
It’s about attention!
If someone is visiting your blog for the first time you’ve only got a very short time frame in which to convert them to regular readers. Making it hard for them to get a feel for your blog by not providing multiple posts on the main page of the blog means the likelihood of that person becoming a regular reader (or in my case, adding your blog to my Bloglines account) is greatly reduced.
I even visited one blog recently with this format, and upon trying to find some of the more recent posts (these style of blogs usually have their options at the bottom of the page), I was taken to a page that consisted of a motherf*cking Tag Cloud!!!: yep, a mf tag cloud!!!. Great!, all I wanted was to read a couple of recent posts because the post I’d read sounded interesting….and this is what I got. Suffice to say, I didn’t add that blog to my Bloglines account.
It’s all very well and good to have pretty and trendy blogs, but for attention, functionality is a much better thing for your blog.
I feel better now 🙂
