I was just theming some "read more" links for the news section of a new site. The design I am building calls for an ugly great button on every news item's teaser, which consists of just a headline (the node title) and a teaser that is a couple of sentences long.
For evidence I've conducted an extensive survey of newspaper websites. I even visited some terrible right-wing ones like the Telegraph.
These people are experts of "clickthrough" they measure the impact of every headline in order to maximise their pitiful ad revenue. At the Telegraph there is apparently a big screen in the news room showing the most popular stories on the website. Nothing focuses the mind like a big screen.
I've made a startling discovery - it seems the headline is more important than the size of the read more button. The most popular story on the telegraph this month was about a boring man catching a big carp.
And the headline: MAN CATCHES CARP THE WEIGHT OF KYLIE MINOGUE (is the Telegraph web editor angling for a job at The Sun?),
Most bizarrely this story had no "read more" button at all. In fact none of the news stories on any of the websites I looked at did. This is madness - how do people know what to click on? Princess Diana must be turing in her grave. I wonder how this will effect house prices?
They've somehow trained their visitors that clicking on the headline will take you to the story. It is time to put this remarkable finding into practice, and cull those unnecessary links.
