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What Does the Decline of the Record Album Have to Do With Your Blog?

When you look at music purchases, it’s pretty clear that we’re a lot more focused on singles than we ever were back in the heyday of the full album.

We’ve always been focused on singles, of course, in the sense that hit singles drove us to buy albums. But the album was still the primary distribution mechanism for music. This is because singles back then, due to record companies practices and the limitations of the media, were pretty lame:

* Relatively few of the tracks of any given album were released as singles

* Cassette and CD singles weren’t really cost-effective — even if you could get every track separately, it was cheaper and easier to just get the whole album, and eat the crappy songs to get the songs you wanted.

* Playing back singles was annoying — who wanted to change a cassette or CD single after every one or two songs?

Of course, with the rise of the mp3 and the convenience of “pick, click and pay” online music stores, all that has changed. While bands still release albums, people think of buying in terms of tracks. And everyone has had to make adjustments.

What’s All This Have to Do With Blogs?

I’m simple-minded, so I like simple analogies: If blogs are like albums, and blog entries are like singles, then feedreaders, search results, and sharing have put the focus on entry pages instead of blog main pages.

For example, if you come upon this entry because you found it in a search, or someone sent you a link, you’re probably not going to visit the main page — you’ll either get what you need from this entry or you won’t. If we’re lucky, you’ll be inspired to check out a few other entries in the blog, so we’d better make it easy for you to do this.

Similarly, if you’re using a feedreader, then you’re jumping in directly to particular entries (if you’re even leaving the feedreader at all), and you’re even more likely to bypass the blog’s main page.

Optimize Your Blog Main and Entry Pages

The design of your blog needs to support both folks who start from your main page, and people who hop in directly to entries. Just how much you’ll want to focus on each type of behavior depends on your blog’s traffic, so check your blog’s Web and feed metrics and see how people are getting to your blog.

* Make sure your blog’s main page quickly, cleanly and clearly explains what your blog is about. I also prefer main pages where I can see and scroll through the full content of the most recent entries, so I can get a better sense of what’s going on, without doing a lot of clicking.

* On blog entry pages, give people a “next step” once they finish with the current entry. Let people flow to other content in your blog, through something as simple as previous/next navigation, or a sidebar of recent or highlighted entries. You want to give people a chance to see more of your content, after they get what they need (but before they bounce off your site).

Now, I still like albums, and I still like blog main pages. However, I also like the directness of reading blogs via feedreaders — it focuses solely on the content of the entry, and strips out all the other cruft. Your challenge is to try to accomodate both types of visitors.

What do you think about the idea that some blog designs focus too much on main pages, and not enough on entry pages? Leave a comment and let me know what you think.

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