Jeremy Adam Davis

Yesterday I wrote a post about great blogs first posts and I would like to show some things I learned while going through all those blogs.

Capitalization of Post Titles

Of the 14 blogs in the above mentioned post, all but two capitalize each keyword in the post title. After comparing the various blogs a bit, I feel that capitalizing keywords makes the title feel more important and is a little bit easier to read. So I am going to go with the crowd and capitalize my keywords in my post titles.

Archives

While looking for this first posts the first thing I would look for was some form of Archives page. I was surprised at how different each site treated this blog element.

Here’s the breakdown of how the 14 sites used post archives.

• Categorical and Chronolocial View - Four sites used this method. I think this is the best way if your blog can afford the space for an archives page link. Of these I want to bring attention to Probloggers Archives page. While most sites simply had their archives in some form of list, Problogger had it divided in to very digestible chunks with each category having a brief writeup about the type of information to be found in that category. They also had a very concise way to view post chronologically if that’s the visitors desire. Very nice way of offering everything you want in a very usable manner. Top notch.

• Categorical Only - Five sites used this. Having a categorical only view is fine with me, it can save space and very rarely do I have the urge to see what someone wrote in October 2006.

• Chronological Only - Only two sites had this. Having only a chronological view seems like a waste of space since a categorical view would be much more useful.

• No Archives - Amazingly three sites have no archival way to view posts. In this increasingly search-dependent world I’m assuming these blogs choose to make their visitors use the blogs search to find relevant topics. In my opinion this is a very poor choice to not give your visitors any archival way to view past posts, but then again I don’t have a six-figure adsense check to take a picture with so I’m not going to hold it against them.

Well after viewing all the ways sites handle their post archives I think what will work best for me right now is to have a categorical view. After a year or so when their are more posts to wade through I will implement something similar to how Problogger has their archives page.

Date Blog Started

Although I know alot of these blogs probably deleted some of their older posts or simply moved their posts from an older blog, I find it interesting that four of the 14 first post was at the very beginning of the month. And it looks like I’m among them to since I started this as kind of a New Years resolution thing.

Paris Hilton Posts

Apparently the Hotel Heiress is a hot topic because two of the first 14 posts were Paris-related. Also there were three other blogs that had a Paris post. So I guess I better draft some Paris post if I’m gonna keep up with the Jones’. Here’s the links to the other Paris posts cause I know you’re asking - Problogger Paris Post, SEO Book Paris Post, Engadget Paris Posts.