You’ll get even more mileage from Amy Gahran’s must-read series on the seven styles of blog posts if you consider it in conjunction with the site usability findings of the Eyetrack III project. For example, the study found that pages with large headline font sizes relative to the article text encourage scanning and discourage careful reading. So if you tend to do a lot of link or blurb posts, then large headlines probably serve your readers well. However, if you tend to write a fair percentage of longer posts, though, (assuming that you want people to actually read those posts), then you probably want to keep the headlines smaller and in line with the main text of the post. Also, long posts tend to pull the reader down the page more than short blurbs. So if you use a lot of short posts (or if you write long posts but only show a paragraph or two on the main page) then your site navigation design will matter more, since users will tend to use it more heavily rather than following the content flow on the home page.
Other interesting findings from Eyetrack III:
- Most readers will scan at least five headlines, whether or not they are “above the fold.” So don’t worry too much about scrolling.
- The first few words of your post title have a strong influence on whether your readers keep reading. Make them count.
- “If your desire is to have website readers examine all or most of the type on your homepage, you may want to keep headline size and blurb size comparable.”
I’ll be incorporating some of these findings into the forthcoming site redesign of e-Literate.
Michael Feldstein is the founder of e-Literate who currently works as the Senior Program Manager for MindTap at Cengage Learning. For more information, see his profile page.
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