Full-frontal content
- At a glance
- This entry was written on November 15, 2005.
- The entry prior to this is entitled Getting it right.
- The entry following this is entitled What I'm talking about.
- There is 1 comment on this post.
- This entry has been tagged as Blogs, Newspapers.
- Archives are also available.
I've noticed that over the past few personal websites I've done, there's been one common theme (aside from black text on a white background): the full text of the most recent article is almost always front and center on the front page.
In the newspaper world, it's the kind of thing we like to call a "hold." I have at various times in my career been told to hold a story or two to the cover since studies show time and again that readers don't often follow stories inside to the jump. In a newspaper, holds can suck the color right out of a page design (especially if you get one of those writers who's long-winded and touchy about having his copy cut), yet on the web, I don't seem to mind.
One key reason is that there's no limit on the space, really. A newspaper page is X picas wide by X picas tall and as much as you'd like to stretch that thing by another handful of picas some days, it's just not going to happen.
With a web page, this page can scroll on forever and forever. There is no practical limit to how tall this page can become (in fact, I've had to edit this entry a time or two now to lengthen it because this design has a practical limit on how short an entry can be). And if I'm giving people the freshest content right up front, why make them click on a link just to get to it?
Sure, clicking a link's a really minor thing when compared with flipping to page 5C and searching for a jump from the front page of the sports section, but me, I'm all about removing obstacles to content. In case people would rather read an entry on its permalink page, I changed the headline to a link to the inside page, but I figure that casual visitor will probably just scroll down and read until I bore them (which is usually not terribly long after they read the headline).
And I still have refers to past content, from the "Back Issues" link in the refer bar to the two prior posts excerpted at the bottom of the page and a few before that listed over in the sidebar. Eventually when I have a few minutes of time from a few more-pressing projects I'm working on, there'll be search functionality over there, too (I really dislike Movable Type's built-in search and need to take the time to rig up a fulltext MySQL search instead).
I figure people can get to the past refers at the bottom because, let's face it, if they can't make it through one post, they're not going to be interested in reading more of them. I'm also kind of hoping that visitors would read a whole article before commenting (though no one has yet). That's why the comments link doesn't appear until the bottom of the post.
Now, this way of doing things doesn't make sense for a heck of a lot of people out there. If you update frequently and your entries have a certain chronological order to them, there's a pretty good chance that repeat visitors could miss a couple of entries. Here, aside from my newspaper series and a few of the Movable Type archives, it doesn't really matter what order you read things in. And in those cases, I try to get links to previous installments right up at the top of the post so that people can back up if they need to.
It's a little like the difference between "Lost" and "Seinfeld." If you miss an episode of "Lost," you're ... well ... lost. "Seinfeld," though, you can jump right in wherever you please and be right up to speed (generally speaking).
Carrying that simile out, I guess I'm trying to make this a blog about nothing.
Comments
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I found that very interesting. I’ve been trying to figure out how to put together my own newsletter and find that the same intricate details you mention here can be so overwhelming, I just want to give up and call it a zine. I hope to see more entries like this. Your perspective on the pros and cons of zines over newsletters would be fascinating.
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