Stop Hiding Your Freaking Content

I absolutely hate going to a blog (and I visit far too many, I assure you) only to have an article title, the first paragraph of the article, and a “continue reading” link that takes me to the full article. Why would you take me off the front page of your site? Don’t you think that will decrease the amount of time i’ll spend on your site reading your content? 

Suppose i’ve missed three posts on your site. In order for me to catch up and see all three of those posts, you’re INTENTIONALLY making me click more times than I have to; you’re taking me off your front page almost immediately in order to ping-pong me back and forth between sub-pages. Why? Why not provide all the content on the page at once?

If your answer is something along the lines of aesthetics, that by cutting off each article the user now sees each post taking up the same amount of space on the front page, then I would counter with, “You’ve not only made every post on your front page seem equally important (even though we know they aren’t), but you’ve increased the potential that the user will NEVER read certain articles.” You’ve put the power in their hands to access content, or not. As a web user, i’m inevitably going to skim… it’s my nature and my way of sizing up a site before I ever actually start taking in anything beyond the visual content. But i’m much more likely going to read something provided to me in full rather than something I have to go hunting for. Stop making me work so hard to get to THE ONLY REASON YOUR SITE EXISTS.

Yes, I know it’s only one click to get to the full article. But then it’s another click to get to the next article; so it’s technically two clicks. And if the user happens to ignore using the sidebar, they have to click once to get to the first article, again get back to the front page, and then again to get to the next article (and so on and so forth). For some less-web-savvy users, that’s THREE clicks to read TWO articles you simply could have provided me on the front page without all the fuss. Make me do that enough times, and I never visit your site again. My time is important, stop wasting it.

Can anyone offer up any positive reasons to layout a blog like this?

Addendum – My friends at Neubix do this on their company blog The Big Noob, but I think it works there because of the unique layout and the simple fact that they have five contributing authors. It’s a different feel.