Comments on: Anatomy Of A Perfect Post

By: sbspalding

sbspalding — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 10:04:36 +0000

That's a really interesting suggestions. Do you find people are willing to click through to read the entire thing.

Better question. Does it matter?

By: jeff gordon

jeff gordon — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 02:09:51 +0000

the “dark and stormy nights” section made me laugh.

By: landscho

landscho — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 23:24:16 +0000

Since the web is a very fast medium and people will tend to leave a website before reading all of it I think the most important thing is to do the right highlighting, by color, boldness and bullets. People must get the point fast and easy and in best case it is so got, that the will read the whole articel.

By: Jez

Jez — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 22:04:23 +0000

Great Article.. only discovered your article through Louis Gray Shared Feed on google Reader.

I love how you should attract attention to your post.. got a couple of other points to add:

An article now should be constructed with an executive summary (less than 100 words, preferably less than 255 charcaters), and links to directly related information. If the entire article if covering a range of different topics, then it should be split into different posts. The entire Article length should not be more than two pages of A4. Otherwise it's rambling and should be split across more than one article.

This would allow the author to put his main point across sufficiently, with the reader having understanding.

By: wellsworth

wellsworth — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 05:26:11 +0000

I like your idea of keeping a post easy to understand.

After all, it is our job to get the point across, not the readers job to understand it. If we're doing our job, that will keep them reading on without stopping just to understand something. The writer is the one with the fresh idea and we have to
explain what's fresh from the oven.

What I have done is put the bullets up top, with links to the sub-headers. This way the reader doesn't have to read the whole thing, (even though we'd like him to) but giving them fast access to what first interest them, and maybe then they'll read some more.

Maybe the first sentence isn't always at the top, its the first sentence we can get them to read, which leads them to read the second sentence.....I know I scan the headlines of a page first to see what interests me, so providing bullets or mini-headlines with links up top will give the reader the option of getting to the point they came for without losing interest waiting for the punch line.

By: Sahara

Sahara — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 02:37:20 +0000

Thanks for making it sound so easy. Sometimes I just feel brain dead and cannot come up with what I feel is the correct structure but if I follow some of the steps you have written, I should be able to accomplish it fairly easy.