In the process of redesigning this blog I’ve been stuck on the homepage. What on Earth should I feature on the homepage? Who cares what I put on the homepage? Who is going to the homepage?
Designing a blog is different from other sites. The general readership subscribes to your feed and from that point onward typically falls into one of these scenarios:
- They never return to the site again - they only read the content of the site via some sort of feed aggregator.
- They follow the feed and visit the permalinks to the individual post to read or review the whole article on the site.
So whether or not your avid reader returns to your site or not, they most certainly are not going back to the homepage in order to get the latest content from your site. So who goes there? I’d assume only new visitors will enter your blog at it’s homepage. But even that is unlikely because most visitors will either come through a search engine result pointing to a direct article page or a reference someone else made on another web-site that cites one of your articles.
There has to be a better way.
So it’s safe to say that the homepage can in many cases provide little or no value to most of your users. But that’s only true if the homepage of your blog only supplies your readership with the exact same information that your feed can provide them with. What I mean is that everything on the front page of a blog is automated and I think that’s the problem. Your feed does a good enough job, actually, a better job at automating the delivery of your latest content.
There has to be some value that you can provide that the feed can’t. That’s where you come in - what better way to solve this problem than to introduce a human element into the mix. You. What I’m suggesting is what I’ve decided to do for the new version of this site: edited content on the homepage versus automated. I believe my latest article is not always going to be my most relevant or appealing for most of my readership. Imagine if every periodical news magazine’s cover story was the last story approved by the editor before going to press. That is practically how a typical blog is set up.
How would you do it?
So now I’m asking you: What are some better strategies to add value to your blog’s homepage? What type of content would you choose to hand select for your blog’s homepage? How often would you do it? How much of it would you feature? These are all things to consider. I hope someone reading this has some good ideas. I just might use them on this site!
Alex Berger Says:
10:16 amDec 24I agree and personally love the idea. There are always pieces i feel are much more relevant that get lost as you write. A top 10 or featured blogs of the month etc. I think could help direct people to some of the more major pieces without forcing them to sort through random entries in which they might potentially lose interest.
Jim Jeffers Says:
11:48 amDec 24Thanks Alex, I’m also thinking a monthly self-edited homepage is the route to go based on how often I’ll be posting and the amount of time I could devote towards it.
Chuck Reynolds Says:
1:21 pmDec 25If your blog only a blog, then you have to think of different ways to deep link to better posts you’ve had in the past or to display other stuff related to the site but not found in your RSS feeds. When designing mine I was fighting with the idea (and still may do it) of only having one post on the homepage, even an excerpt of that home page and having all my lifecasted events on the home page. I mean like my latest diggs, latest bookmarks from delicious, latest tweets, etc because those are all relevant to my site’s content. They wouldn’t be displayed on any other page of the blog or individual post pages or in the feed so that may give them more reason to come to the front.
I haven’t implemented that because I thought and I’m not going to have the amount of content ready to support that yet and I need to build a bit of a reader base before I started tinkering too much with the idea. All the ideas in my head keep me from actually completing everything so I finally just banged it out and finished it and launched as it is now (http://rynoweb.com) and I can make changes when I see fit.
Instead of having an individual about page with not a lot of copy, why not have a section on your homepage to include information about you, the blog, etc. Of course the amount of copy would determine if and how that would work up front but it’s another idea to work with.
And if all fails – give away a free ebook/whitepaper! (marketers solution for everything) Haha
Cheers and Merry Christmas
Chuck Reynolds Says:
1:27 pmDec 25The other thing I forgot to mention is I’m looking into the “popular posts” plugin by Alex King, which could be used as a “best of” sort of deal. Again I need to let the blog build up a little before I start displaying that information but I do have it currently tracking so I can use that in the future.
I also liked the old problogger.net site design because right up front he had a list of like 10 posts from all time that were the best “how to” type of posts as an introduction not only to blogging but his site and how it helps you become a better blogger.
Okay I’m done… for now.
Jim Jeffers Says:
9:46 pmDec 25Chuck, thanks for your response! I’ve thought about it as well and I’m now considering highlighting a featured post (either one or a few) along with ma.gnolia.com feed to show recent readings. With a brief about the site / author blurb below the featured content. So I too may go for something similar to a one post homepage. I’m not certain yet either.