Time for a little open discussion. Do you prefer full posts or excerpts on the front page of the blogs you frequent?
There are pros and cons for both. My personal preference, as you may have noticed, is for excerpts, but according to my ever bulging email client many of you disagree.
Making people click for the full content makes sense and is something I suggest you try if you haven’t already. Putting full posts on the front page can, for instance, cause duplicate content penalty problems with Google. And front page excerpts are more likely to encourage deeper clicking and a higher page view count, which should keep every blogger happy.
So, what do you think and which do you prefer?
I prefer excerpts but I think not enough sites are good about letting readers know there’s more. Big arrows or buttons make it easier to know there’s more so I don’t just ready what little is there and move on.
I prefer full feeds. And I’d really appreciate it as a user to have full feeds from your site. I know the benefits from having excerpts, but still. I hardly read your content, simply because you don’t display it all in my RSS feed. Just my 2 cents.
excerpts all the way! they allow a quicker overview of recent posts that even a regular visitor may have missed.
Excerpts for really long articles, full if it’s only a paragraph or two, although i like the WP themes that force the newest post to be full, even if the tag exists.
I prefer excerpts all the way. I’m having a problem figuring out how to accomplish that on my site. I’m using WP and they give an option for excerpts within the RSS, but nowhere can i find the option for my home page.
Any suggestions?
Right now I choose excerpts, because there’s a lot I want to display in my front page and that’s why I need to make excerpts as interesting as possible to make people click on the post.
I prefer to put full posts on the front page as my site is still young and gaining readership, and I feel that it helps with retention as my writing needs a lot of polish. Excerpts require the ability to get the reader’s attention and make them delve deeper. Perhaps I’m over-analyzing though.
What has been your experience?
Do excerpts drive more people away than they keep?
Perhaps a combination is best if you have different levels of post content. For instance, on my site, I tend to post short external link snippets throughout the day. Then a few times a week I post longer articles of my own. Additionally, I syndicate a podcast to my site, so John C. Dvorak’s tech5 is a small post with an audio player attached which seems easiest viewed on the front page rather than in a “listen after the jump” format.
This is a good topic. I’m interested in what others think about it.
I definitely prefer the full. Excerpts don’t bother me as much on a website. They just bother me in RSS feeds. I don’t have time to go to every site I subscribed to. If I did I wouldn’t have a second to work. So basically, if you give partial feeds I just delete you. I would think that a lot of people would feel the same way about excerpts on a website. It takes an extra click and a few more seconds just to get to the content. It may not sound like much but times that buy 2k feeds that I subscribe and it adds up. Just don’t have the time.
I realize that the question wasn’t about feeds, but partial content is one in the same to me.
More recently I’ve been going with full posts. In the beginning however I was doing excerpts. I think why things changed is because I don’t have a ‘read more’ link created automatically and to make my posts excerpts I had to write up a whole lot of code. Maybe I’m lazy – but, then again, I do like the way full posts look on the home page of my blog. I’m undecided!
- Ashleigh
I prefer excerpts, I don’t understand why people would make a beef about a single click per story to read it.
Of course, I never actually see your home page –since I subscribe to RSS, and am brought straight to the full article page. I’m also the type of guy that doesn’t want to read the article inside my RSS aggregator. I wanna see it in the visage that the publisher intended.
That’s just me though. Silly me.
I prefer full post RSS feeds. I don’t really care for full post on this site though. It’s easier to navigate if I don’t have to scroll a whole lot down in case of long articles.
And in the case of full post RSS feeds, people will still click through to comment.
Full. On both the front page and the feed. :)
In RSS feeds, it doesn’t really matter to me whether or not there are full or excerpted posts. I usually click through to the site anyway.
On just regular sites, it depends on the layout. I think excerpts work well on sites like this one. Mainly because you have enough sidebar content to fill the white space. On other sites, I prefer just one full post with links to go back. Most of the personal blogs I visit are like that. On sites like that, it’s almost required that if you want to leave a comment you have to click through to the single post page.
I agree with Desu though, I think it’s nice that if there are multiple posts on the front page, the first one is fully parsed and the rest are excerpted. It’s a nice way to show off your main work yet let your visitors know that you’ve done other stuff.
Are you thinking about a front page change?
I agree with Mr Castilla on the RSS feeds front. That does annoy me. I for one would like this to be changed.
On the front pages of blogs themselves, though, it can be good—well, I’m using excerpts on mine at present. I guess it depends on the blog. It’s currently trendy to display teaser images on the front page, and “magazine-style” themes are popular. If full posts are used, it’s probably a good idea to not have very many posts on the front page.
i like the full post, anybody can cut it by himself!
Put me in the “excerpts only” column too. I like having a larger number of posts showing even before the reader starts scrolling so that something will catch her eye quickly.
Of course bloggers prefer excerpts simply because it’ll promote more page views. But for readers, blog is a seamless alternative to websites, you should be able to read easily without clicking here and there- after all if we update frequently, our readers will find it more taxing to read.
The best solution is how Michael did it on Techcrunch. He only use excerpt is the post is longer than usual or it’s a featured post.