To answer your question, from my perspective, I’d say that visual appeal is critical to “grab” the first time reader (TechTraction visual appear needs some real work). In that situation, I’d say visual appeal is number one, but only under that condition. Overall, I’d say that content is still number one. It’s the one thing that will keep readers returning to your site. If your site looks amazing, people will stop and look around, but if the content just isn’t there, they won’t come back. Right now I spend most of my time focused on posting consistency and overall content, which explains my site’s poor visual appeal.

Hope that answers your question. Thanks for stopping by.

Normally, the first post is always shown completely. The remaining posts display the first paragraph and then the “more” option. I do it manually but am working on a way altering the main display loop to display the first post completely and the rest only the excerpt. Once I figure this out, I’ll post the details here.

Finally, the idea of trimming the fat and displaying excerpts after the first post brings up another idea I’ve been wondering about: how many posts is the ideal number for a blog’s main page? I don’t have an answer but would love to hear what others think on the subject. I might even blog about it next week and include a short poll.

I hope the break is doing you good. I’ve also been thinking of trimming my site down. Specifically, I want to show my posts on pages 2 onwards as excerpts, rather than full content.

The guess is that I can do this using some php code, whereby if homepage, show full text, and if any other, show excerpt, but I’m not sure. I’m also thinking of changing the homepage articles, so that only the very first one is full, and the other 3 (I show 4 posts on the homepage) are excerpts.