DISQUS

Vincent Stinks · 8 months ago

Great post, informative. I always erred on th side of keeping links in text and just using target _blank irrespective of whether the item is internal or external, this should probably be used in conjunction with further reading at the bottom of the post so that anything ignored in the process of reading can be access at the end, if they bothered to get that far :)

Ed Richardson · 8 months ago

Cheers Vincent.

The target_blank is a good point. I personally don't do this, but not out of an active choice.

Usually when I'm reading other blog posts myself I use tabbed browsing simply do a ctrl + click to follow links.

Getting readers to the bottom of the post is the ultimate challenge, comments is the holy grail!

On that note, thanks for the comment!

Vincent Stinks · 8 months ago

What's the perfect length of a post? Who knows, and at what point do you split the post into pages? I think it is all relative, although I tend to go as much on content and intent as I do with whether an article actually looks good from a design perspective :)

Ed Richardson · 8 months ago

I generally don't introduce pagination into a post, we'll I've not written one yet where I've deemed it necessary.

I'm more of a content focussed bod myself, by that's more my trade and yours is more design focussed, so that should be appropraite for both of us.

Until I get the new site up, I'm not allowed to talk about design!

Lucas Gonze · 8 months ago

For my own blogs (blog.gonze.com, soupgreens.com) I have no good way for people to return to old posts, so writing is completely transient. This can't be the right thing, I know. The blockker is that common widgets like a calendar-oriented browser for the archives don't fix the problem.

Maybe the Wordle approach is a good tool. I'd be interested in hearing about your experiences implementing it.

Vincent Stinks · 8 months ago

I added an relavant links plugin on one of my blogs http://www.techtalkpoint.com/ but it did very little. I also added a menu header and more prominent search box and again there was very little impact, but then that could be that the grey ad boxes are enough to drive people away, or they find what they need and go away immediately, as 25% of my traffic comes to a post about booting your mac from CD/DVD.

Ed Richardson · 8 months ago

I think we all find that one or two specific posts generate more interest than we are expecting and you never quite seem to work out why those posts get the vote of confidence.

But once you do, perhaps you should focus some traffic from those posts?

Put new internal links from that post?

Do a related story to generate more interest on the subject with links to it from the old post?

One thing I'm never afraid to do now is go back to old posts and add new links if they've become popular.

Back to the multi-tasking highway!

Ed Richardson · 8 months ago

Wordle's, popular posts, tag clouds should all fix access to old posts.

Combined with related reading at the bottom of your posts and it should start to encourage visitors to explore more.

Once I move to the new site, I'm sure I'll write a few posts on the transition experience and one of those posts will be relating new widgets for sure.

Thanks for the comment Lucas!

Claudia Naylor · 8 months ago

This was good, but what I really need to know is how to link from the first paragraph of an article to a secondary page. I can do external links, but I need to make that first page less bulky for lack of a better word. Have you a link (:-) to the info I need?

Ed Richardson · 8 months ago

Hi Claudia, if the link is to another part of the same HTML file you can still use the "a" tag, just use it combination with an "id".

So define the paragraph you want to use with the link using the standard " a href="id_name" "in a later section "a/". Then at the paragraph you want that to link to just specify the id name: "p id="id_name" " later section "/p".

If it is separate html document, but an internal page to your blog, link to it as you would with a standard html link, using the http address.

The W3c link to the anchor tag details and using id is:

W3C anchor tag

I've had to use " in place of opening/closing brackets in this reply as I'm not sure how to exempt code in disqus comments!

Hope this helps!

Thanks for the comment.