Went thru adding <!–more–> to all of my posts. I am currently placing this after the first paragraph unless it is a very short paragraph and if so, then after the second paragraph. I am not sure of when and where this is most appropriate to use but will look more into it. Moving forward, I may be more diligent in doing this while writing my posts paying careful attention to how I structure my posts and most specifically, the “lead in” to the article.

What I am realizing in looking at these changes is that there are a few benefits to doing so. Page download time will be reduced due to only the lead-in for each article being downloaded. Subsequently, the amount of bandwidth to serve the page will also be reduced which also means using less resources and associated costs. Users will only receive the full article for those they are interested in placing a lot of importance on the opening paragraph of a post. If the first paragraph is not interesting, people will not click to read more about the article. Lastly, it reduces scrolling which I feel helps to clean up the interface while increasing usability. As most of us know, one of the biggest annoyances on the Internet is having to scroll.

It wasn’t until after I had gone thru and done this that I discovered how-to add something other then the default “Read the rest of this entry »” text. To do so, enter a space after the more with your new text like this:

<!–more Read more of this article –>

Which will display as: Read more of this article