Trying A Different Front Page Design

January 30th, 2007

BlogsI write way too many posts that fall off the front page before I’d like, so I’m playing around with a slighty different front page design. It’s basically showing 15 excerpts with cute little icons. The category and search results pages look similar to this design.

In case you’re wondering, it’s a matter of changing the front index.php to have < ?php the_excerpt> instead of the full content. Then you have to make sure all your posts have an image icon and a text excerpt in the Optional Excerpt field.

Anyhow, just testing; it’s easy enough to put this back the way it was if it doesn’t prove to be useful.

Note: I added a “Read the rest of this entry” link at reader Char’s suggestion, as clicking on the post title isn’t totally intuitive.

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9 comments!

  1. comment Gravatar Mike - January 30th, 2007

    I was skeptical, but that looks pretty good, actually.

  2. comment Gravatar webomatica - January 30th, 2007

    yeah I’m kind of intrigued by it. I think the thing I need to add is a previous / next post button on the single post view.

  3. comment Gravatar Char - January 30th, 2007

    Hey! I like it, but I have one little note. It is not intuitively obvious how to get to the rest of the story. Some blogs use the word “More…” or some variation of that. It wasn’t until I clicked on the post name that I realized that there really was more.

    Otherwise - I really like it.

  4. comment Gravatar webomatica - January 30th, 2007

    Hi Char… good point. I’m sure there’s a way to add that.

    Otherwise, people may think my posts consist of 1 paragraph apiace :)

  5. comment Gravatar engtech - January 30th, 2007

    Putting a word count before the more would be good as well.

    This is essentially what I do with posts that fall off the front page:
    http://engtech.wordpress.com/page/3/

    Making the read more obnoxiously big helped as well.

  6. comment Gravatar Webomatica - January 30th, 2007

    Gee, so many useful comments - good thing WordPress is easy to tweak. Is a plug in needed for a word count, or is that something callable by a WordPress tag? Ill look into it.

  7. comment Gravatar webomatica - January 30th, 2007

    Okay - got a “read more” plus a word count thingie courtesy a plug in.

  8. comment Gravatar tunequest - January 31st, 2007

    Yeah, the “Read More + word count” definitely helps. Makes the front page seem more like an index/launching point, making the recent stuff easier to scan. And that’s good; before, if I didn’t subscribe to your feed, I’d have missed half your posts.

    Good stuff.

  9. comment Gravatar Webomatica - January 31st, 2007

    Okay, good to hear. Thanks for offering suggestions. I’m pleased that it was all constructive and stuff that is straightfoward to do - plus I’m learning more about WordPress in the process.

Please comment!