Blog design
Blog designs can generally be split in to 2 main categories: those that show the full article contents on the homepage and those which show a synopsis only.
So which is the better design?
It totally depends on your blog audience. If your audience are die-hard fans and comeback everyday to see your latest article, you don’t want to force them to read a synopsis and have to click through to go to the main article. They just want to go to your blog and read whatever is new.
However, if you don’t have die-hard fans, you want to include a synopsis only on the main blog page. This allows users to scan your articles and click through to read any of interest for them. If you include the full article, you’ll find that most of your site visitors will scan down the first article and leave without going any further.
You should also include meaningful blog titles, so that readers can scan through the list of blogs and quickly find the articles of interest. If I’d called this article ‘To Synopsis or not’, you can be sure that if you were scanning through a long list of article titles, you probably wouldn’t notice it (or at last be drawn to it). By starting with the word ‘Blog’, it’ll stand out to anyone who is interested in blogs about blogs.
Further on that point, you should start the blog (and the synopsis for the blog) with the purpose of the blog and then go in to more details. That way, users can start to read it and decide if they want to finish it or bail. If you haven’t got to the main point quickly enough, you may have lost your readers before they realise that they are interested in what you are writing about.
The same can be said for the individual paragraphs within the blog, they too should start with a couple of keywords for the topic of the paragraph, so that users can scan down the paragraphs and only read the paragraphs of interest to them.
There should be a lot of small paragraphs, with one point per paragraph.
Finally bullet points and imagery can help users quickly find article of interest to them.
