Blog Formatting 101: Adjust Where Appropriate
This afternoon I clicked on a link from R.E.M.’s Twitter and it brought me to an article on The Huffington Post about some music exclusives, including R.E.M. (alas why I clicked on the link).
Now there comes a time in every blogger’s life where you have to make a few decisions. Have I outgrown my current format? Is the theme or design I am currently using appropriate for how I am blogging?
Anyone who has heard me rant about things to watch out for as a blogger knows I constantly pick at The Huffington Post. While they consistently have great content, the user experience is completely bogged down by ads and poor formatting.
Here’s the example I ran into this afternoon:
This screenshot shows the article I clicked on from Twitter. I could only screenshot the title, byline, social icons and tags because there is such a plethora of tags! This isn’t tag stuffing as they all relate to the blog content and aren’t repetitive. It should however be looked at in regards to other options for displaying these tags. Tagging is fantastic for indexing, searching for similar content and a quick look of the subject of the piece but this is incredibly clunky.
The large number of tags on this post caused this block of content to take up an entire fold pushing the actual article down to the third fold on the page. The blog post promised exactly what it promised in the title and tags but spans well over 20 folds. Back to formatting — this is a blog, not a newspaper. We can only view so much of the page at once. Consider breaking this article into multiple articles? That would cut down on the length of the post and the tags in the byline, making it much easier to digest and read. Even if the pieces of the larger whole are related you can link to them within the content or in an included list for readers to navigate in between. This is also a better option in regards to your search engine optimization.
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