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Size Your Jump Breaks, Properly

The most important single part of any post is the first sentence, and the first paragraph.

Jump break, the auto summarisation feature for Blogger blogs, helps you focus your readers attention on the first sentence / first paragraph of your posts, while offering each reader a personal choice - to read more of any individual post - or to scan the rest of the current page.

Careful sizing and wording of the post content, before the Jump Break, makes it more likely that the casual reader will be interested enough to read the entire post.

The portion of the post before the jump break supplements the title of the post.

Use of Jump Break lets you compact the index pages.

By using a Jump Break, you enable the blog to display more posts on the main page, in a smaller space.

With more posts loaded on the main page, the reader is more likely to see a post which interests him, and continue reading. With the smaller space, the blog loads faster, and the reader is more likely to read further.

It's a balancing act.
  1. The smaller the "jump break", the smaller the individual posts when summarised, and the more posts you can fit onto the main page.
  2. The larger the "jump break", the more of each individual post is visible to the reader, immediately.

Make the Jump Break large enough, to help the reader read the complete post.

You size the jump break as small as possible, while still indicating what the post is about. If you want the main page to be properly indexed, you still need some relevant and unique content - above the jump break.

If the post is small overall, say 2 or 3 paragraphs, you might make the jump break text a single sentence. A larger post, say half a dozen paragraphs or more, might justify a full paragraph (2 - 3 sentences) jump break. And again, word the first sentence, and the first paragraph, as carefully as possible.

Look at the post, in 4 distinct elements, to capture readers.

Using a Jump Break, you'll see 4 important components of post content.
  1. The post title.
  2. The first paragraph of each post.
  3. The section ahead of the jump break.
  4. The first paragraph after the jump break.
These are the 4 key post components, that help the reader read the complete post. You want to construct each component as carefully as possible, to maximise the space available for each.

You can use a Jump Break enabled index page as a true posts index.

In some cases, you may wish to use the "Jump Break" to create an index of your posts, by title. Add Jump Break immediately after the title - and any index page (such as a label retrieval) becomes a Title based index.

If you make a true posts index, make it user friendly! You may want to redirect the main page to a welcome post, or static page - and access the "index" as a tabbed page.

With a large blog, install Jump Break on older posts, as time permits.

If you are like me, and never used Jump Break
I have a large blog, and hundreds of posts! I don't have time to edit each post, one at a time, and add a Jump Break!
This is an ideal blog improvement to install using a Progressive Publishing strategy.
  1. Edit the existing posts that you have time to do, right now.
  2. Create new posts, with Jump Breaks installed.
  3. Edit more old posts, later.
  4. Periodically review main page views of all posts updated, and look for problems. Please! Test, periodically, whenever you edit posts.
The more Jump Breaks that you install, the faster you'll be able to install more, on newer and on older posts. It's easier to do it, than to explain it.

Hopefully, if a post is worth writing, it's worth writing properly. This includes proper sizing of the Jump Break, on a post by post basis.

Observe how the "post page" display is presented, to the reader.

You will note that, when you use a jump break, the individual post is displayed, with the text after the jump break, scrolled to the top of the screen. This, too, encourages you to keep your jump break text as short as possible, to avoid your readers losing key information as they start to read the full post.

If you want to see this feature in action, hit the "Home" button, in the menu bar, above - or, click here. Like many blog owners, I'm learning how to use this feature - as well as why to properly use this feature in each post.

Comments

Ray Rousell said…
Sounds good, but how do you do it?
Ana said…
Jump breaks don't work at my blog.

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