Portals, Excerpts, Magazines.. what?

What format should your blog home page be? Should it present a "magazine style" index, short excerpts from recent posts, full text of those posts or something else entirely? In the "old days", web /index.html pages were usually site maps - if there was some area that had regular entries, it was probably called something like "Opinion" or "Commentary", and its index.html probably was a simple old fashioned index listing, possibly arranged chronologically.

Blogging changed all that. The Home page became the most current posts, newest at the top. These were usually complete posts, but some sites started offering excerpts - a paragraph or two with a "Read More" link to get you to the "Permalink" page. The "magazine style" is similar to the "excerpts", but it's possible that the blurb that accompanies the link may not come from the actual post - it may be specially written introductory or "teaser" material.

Which should you use?

Well, whatever the cool kids say you should be using this week, of course.

The fact is that some of your readers will prefer one style and some will prefer another, no matter what is "cool" or "in" this week, this month, this year. My take is that the readers should get what they want: I have an excerpts page, a full posts page, and the Home page is a hybrid magazine style (or was when this post was created). If any reader suggested some other format that they'd prefer, I'd mix that in also: why wouldn't you want to make your readers happy?

Yet choice also creates confusion. Confusion upsets readers, especially new readers, and can drive them away. What to do?

I don't have an answer for that. I think that somewhere there may be some professional web designer who could provide an answer (though the answer might just be "don't offer too much choice"), but it's something I struggle with, and not just on the home page: internal index pages are completely out of control here. They are far too big, with too many entries. I need more organization, more navigation tools.. but those bring their own problems: you don't want people to have to drill through four layers of menus to get to what they want!

Tough questions, too few answers.

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