How long is your home page?

I paged down 4 times on mine.

I generally don't care for intro posts. They especially annoy me when the entire story is only two paragraphs long. I read fast, even on a monitor, so the break is pretty annoying.

Since I read so many blogs via a reader, not having full feed will turn out to be one of the biggest reasons for either not subscribing or unsubscribing.

I sound pretty cranky, don't I? :) All that being said, when a site has consistently good content, all is forgiven in terms of jumping around when reading.

I got 3! I happen to have shorter posts now... otherwise, I think it'd blossom to 7 or 8...

I set only 3 posts on the home page. Any more, and the mouse scroller works overtime.

Read somewhere about Google and duplicate posts. So a post appears on the home page, and it appears as a standalone page. Google doesn't seem to differentiate between the two, so considers the post content to be a duplication. It's part of why I restricted to just 3 posts.

Perhaps you can give more info on this?

I had to page-down three times. I recently cut back the number of posts showing on the front page from 5 to 2 (full, not excerpts). I may go back to three, but I want it to load very quickly. My sidebars are shorter than my content column. That's one of my pet peeves, too. :-)

Like you, I prefer clean & uncluttered pages. I figure the whole point of my blog is to share my writing with people. And I've discovered that I'm pretty impatient when it comes to visiting other blogs, so I want it to be quick, easy, and rewarding when people visit mine.

I paged down 6 times on orangeinks. I am not really a fan of intro posts but I want to feature more articles on my homepage so I use a plugin called Homepage excerpts I display the first five posts in full and use intro for the rest. This keeps my homepage a little short, plus I use a lot of images in my posts so it also helps in hiding the images in the next five post so that my homepage can load faster. I also don't cut posts in my rss and email feeds, I don't want my subscribers go to the trouble of finishing an article in the website.

My site also gives me the number 12. If I look at the rest of the comments here it would appear as if this is too long. I limit my home page to 4 full articles and until now I thought this is not too long. This article has made me think about this though and now I am not at all sure.

I get 5 page downs on Technically Easy. My posts are fairly long, probably longer than the average, so I tend to just display the first two paragraphs. This keeps the length of my page down.

I'm thinking of displaying the full posts, maybe I will in the future.

I only got 3 as well. I can't stand long posts as I have a slight Attention Disorder. I lose interest really easily if the post isn't interesting. Of course, if a person has written something of interest in the past and just happens to be having an 'off' day I usually skim the post and find the good bits but I will read the entire post even if it is long. But if it's my first time visiting, and I don't find it interesting and it's too long :( I usually just drop and go.

Intro posts, well I actually wanted to do it a little while ago becuse I *hate* having to scroll down period and prefer that scroll bars get banned all together but I know I'm living in a dream world when it comes to that idea. Anyway, I couldn't get it working on my blog and I'm glad because I actually prefer having my full posts show up.

Wow long comment. The last thing I wanted to say was that my side bars are definitely shorter than my content. I think that if you have too much on your sidebar, you should probably look into therapy! (I'm kidding)

Great post as always Ben!

Interesting discussion. This is something I've not given much thought to.

I just went and had a look.

LighteningOnline shows 5 posts and is 13 pages long at the moment. That would vary depending on how long my posts are (they vary a LOT in length).

LighteningsBlogworld is 22 pages long and shows 10 posts!!! I wouldn't even have checked this if it hadn't been for this post. I'll see if I can figure out how to change the number of posts on the homepage.

Is the issue with length load time? Or do people get sick of scrolling?

Thanks for explaining how to figure out how many pages too. Lots of people make assumptions about what people already know. Perhaps 90% of readers do but it's nice that the assumption isn't made that ALL readers know this kind of thing - cos I don't. :)

Thanks for the link Ben :) I stumbled this post as a small token of my appreciation.

I tried using a "regular" blog layout (without intros), but it didn't work well for me. Once I switched to this news style theme, my subscribers, electrical consulting sales and custom wiring diagram sales drastically increased.

After quite some time and while using the "regular" layout, I made $300 - $400 per month from adsense and $200 - $300 from affiliate sales. However, I made very few electrical consulting sales.

Selling my own services using this news style theme I made a little over $1,500.00 from electrical consulting sales, custom wiring diagrams sales and ads last month. I think this news style theme with the intros is working for me.

However, I think the type of layout you use depends on your site and what you are trying to accomplish. It also depends on how much stuff you want / need to put on your homepage.

I do agree with you though, I think that intros do not work well with the "regular" blog layout.

Kelly - good points all round. I think intro posts can work with the "news site" layouts I showed above, but the site should really use a full feed too. A few sites use partial feeds AND intro text, which sometimes means you click to the site to read the whole post, only to be faced with a "more" link. Definitely something I'd like to avoid!

Vincent - I may change my home page to display 3 posts. Duplicate content can also occur if you have category pages or a search engine on your site, not just due to content appearing on your home page as well as on the individual posts. I can see it would be sensible to exclude an on-site search engine from other search engines, but the only way to exclude home page content would be to exclude your home page - not a good idea. So, I'm not sure there's a lot you can do about this, unless anyone else has any ideas...

GeekMom - we share a lot of views on this topic. Reducing the number of posts per page is a good way to keep the pages short, but invariably it can result in a lot of pages if you have lots of posts. That's the only reason I haven't reduced from five posts per page yet. I've been trying to move stuff to the Blogging Guide or move it to Tutorials, but as fast as I move them, I post more! Maybe it's a job to do every Saturday as I don't post then.

Louie - that's a novel way to do it. You could also put a few of the older posts at the top of the sidebar. I like what On Blogging Australia has done for example.

Arnold - see, this is what happens when you write tutorials. We have exactly the same problem. You know what might work? How about hiding some of the tutorials from the home page, but still display them in the feed? Maybe display your latest tutorial in a sidebar and say "for more, subscribe to my feed"? That might work. While I can see why a good tutorial should be on the home page, I think that new visitors will not read much of a long post. Shorter posts could be better for them. One to think about?

TechieGuy - full posts work for me, but as Arnold and I have found out, they can make your home page a lot longer. It's hard to find a good balance here.

fragileheart - you seem to have found a good balance. Maybe I should take a leaf out of your book! Full posts are good.

Lightening - it's potentially an issue with both load time and scrolling. Besides, there may not be many people who scroll all the way down, reading everything as they go. It's a bit overwhelming to give someone so many posts when they first visit. As I've said, I need to make some changes in this area too. As for explaining how to figure out the number of pages, don't mention it - that's what my site is all about. Explaining web stuff in plain English. :)

Wayne - no worries, thanks so much for the stumble. :) I think you've done a fine job with your home page, and it's great to see some good results in terms of the money it's generating. Intros not working for a standard blog layout is something I hadn't even thought of until I wrote this post. Now it's hit me, it seems so obvious. I've never read this tip anywhere before - most people just say they like or dislike intros for various reasons. Funny the things we come up with when we write.

Thanks for all the comments, and it's great to see some new and returning people having their say. Keep the comments coming if you have anything else to say. :)

I think it would be hard to make your posts shorter though because with the type of posts you have, you need to go into detail most of the time and it's hard to concise with detail.

But then again, I like that I don't have to click on the 'read more' link on your site and I can just start and finish reading mostly in one scroll. Then again on the other side, I know that I will most likely comment so I usually click on the comment link before I even begin reading your post... so I guess it's kind of the same thing.

Ok I'm just rambling.... but I thought it was rambling that might help? lol

The tutorials are longer than my other posts, so that's why I was thinking about making them subscription-only (see my reply to Arnold, above). I don't think I would try to cut down my other posts. For now, I'll see how it goes with 3 posts on the home page, and go from there. Thanks for the comment - rambling is fine! :)

Hi Ben, thanks for suggesting an input about my site, mymytech. It is indeed true that people may get annoyed with intentional excerpt posts, because they may easily think that it is for you to click on advertisements. But as of my site, I had no intentions whatsoever to do so, because all I wanted to do was to keep the main page as simple and as organized as possible.

I've made changes in layout after you've posted this article, so please do take a look once again. I'm not such a fan of misunderstood criticisms but I'd love to get some feedbacks upon the changes.

Oh, by the way, nice and detailed post =D

Thanks for commenting, Dan. :) Just to be clear, I was actually highlighting your site as a good example of post intros. The "newspaper front page" approach can work quite well. I do think your updated layout is better though and that the continued use of post intros works well for your front page. Glad you liked the post. :)