Corporate Blogs - How to Structure a Good Home Page

Displaying summaries of many articles on the first page as opposed to presenting each posting’s full content may serve to attract users.

In creating homepage designs for blogs, you typically have two options:

• Posting each article in its entirety on the first page so users can read it all without having to click to an article.
• Providing article summaries on the first page that link to the full content on secondary pages.

When managing a corporate blog, it is important to remember that the number of postings may eventually reach the hundreds or thousands depending on the size of the organization. Clearly, not every posting will fit on a single page. This is where you need article summaries linking to the full post in the archives.

Web Usability Design columnist Jakob Nielsen discusses in detail his findings through an eye-tracking study of how people read the “official” weblogs of corporations. His gaze plots diagram how users read the front page of several corporate blogs.

In short, his study revealed that the blogs featuring full articles on the front page lost the interest of users after the first post, whereas the blogs offering summaries on the homepage were able to attract the user to browse through more, if not all of the article summaries.

Through Nielsen’s study and general experience, corporate blogs fare much better with summaries rather than full articles on their homepage. Article summaries allow blogs to post more in a shorter page-length, thus exposing users to a broad selection of topics.

With more topics available in the same, if not shorter amount of space, users are more likely to find something that interests them. This will entice them to click through to read more, as opposed to abandoning the blog after the first full-length article failed to appeal to them. Few people will actually continue browsing after exhausting their interest on the first posting.

So for the most part, it is best to include summaries on the homepage of your corporate blog, especially if you have a wide product range with many topics to discuss. People are simply not fully interested in everything, but may prefer browsing through to find the one thing they are.

In the case that you do receive regular visitors that are passionate about everything your company does, you may want to post full articles as Nielsen recommends, but this is rare and unlikely. So stick to the summaries and offer a broad sample of articles in hopes of attracting a user’s interest and getting them to read on.