[Beginner-Intermediate] There are many ways that you can present the contents of your blog posts, all of which depend on the blogging platform that you are using. And the display pattern you choose may make the difference between repeat visitors or having just search engine referrals.

With free platforms, the entire content of each entry is displayed out in full. If you have, say, a cooking blog full of long recipes and discussions, and lots of photos, your blog home page is going to take forever to load each time someone visits.

For this very reason, I not only stopped reading many cooking blogs but I stopped using a free blog platform such as Blogger.com for my own cooking posts. I still have my 4 cooking blog archives, but I use WordPress now for my new/ current cooking blog. (That is, WordPress.org, as opposed to the free-hosted service at WordPress.com.)

With more professional blogging platforms such as WordPress (free, Open Source) or MovableType, you have the choice of displaying a portion of each entry on the home page. You can choose between: full-text, auto-excerpt, or a manually-created summary.

Full-text is the only choice for most free blogging platforms, and often the default for professional platforms. Auto-excerpting usually amounts to the platform display the first X characters of your first paragraph, where X might be 100, 200, etc.

On most of my weblogs, I use auto-excerpt, because of time constraints. The home page only displays an excerpt of the first paragraph, and the full article is visible on the “post” or “permalink” page.

The same setup can be seen right here on this weblog. If you are reading this article because you got here from a link such as from a search engine, then go to the home page and you’ll see what I mean.

On the Movable Type blog I write, I add a manually-created summary for the excerpt of a post. On the Typepad blogs I write, it’s a bit more of a nuisance. I take the first one or two paragraphs and place them in the “post introduction” section. The rest of the article goes into the “post continuation” (aka extended body) section.

Movable Type and Typepad are from Six Apart and are very similar, but can be configured in a number of (complicated?) ways. They also have the free-hosted LiveJournal and, later this year, Vox.

While I’ve dabbled with other blogging platforms, the above-mentioned are the ones I use regularly. Whatever you choose, put some consideration into how you set up the home page, if you have that luxury.

For a weblog that has mostly fairly short posts, I’d recommend you display the entire contents of each post on the home page as well as on post/ permalink pages. For longer posts, especially those frequently containing pictures or other graphics, use some sort of excerpting method.

However, if you have manual control of the amount of excerpt shown on your blog’s homepage, change it up a little from time to time. Showing too short an excerpt might reduce your clickthroughs to the full post. Writing strong intro paragraphs will pull people in, but that’s not always possible for all bloggers. So displaying the first two or three paragraphs as the “excerpt” might be useful in some instances.

Experiment to find your sweet spot.