Point People to More Content

My biggest blogging pet peeve is when a blog doesn’t point you to more content. Blogs typically post entries in reverse chronological order, meaning the latest entries are first. That’s great for delivering new and timely content, which is what blogs are for.

But when you first check out a blog you may not necessarily care about the latest and greatest entries. You’re trying to get a feel for the purpose of the blog, what they cover, the breadth and depth of what they cover. It’s often hard to get a feel for that from the entries on the front page.

And sometimes you just get sucked into a blog and want to keep on reading. So what happens when you get to the end of a blog’s front page? On too many blogs, nothing happens.


You finish reading that last entry, you’re hungry for more, and there’s no where to go. You have to scroll back up and hunt for a list of archive pages. Worse still, if you manage to find the right monthly entry so you can keep reading in chronological order, you have to skip over the entries you already read and find your spot again.

It’s enough to kill whatever interest you had in a new blog.

So why don’t blogs offer some links to keep reading at the bottom of the front page? Some blog platforms have made it standard. Others offer nothing. I added an obscure plugin to my installation of Movable Type earlier this year to offer some paging options at the bottom of the front page.

I think it’s always important to keep pointing people to more content. If you get people hooked but they have to hunt around to keep reading you’re throwing them away. Make it easy for people to stay hooked.

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