For blogging, we’re continuing to see a dichotomy in terms of design. On one end of this spectrum, there are extremely minimalist designs like. Zen Habits is a very fast loading site due in large part to this zen-like simplicity. The header is a simple font while there’s only a single post on the home page. Well, along with three additional recent posts in the footer. There are no ads and just a few links in a single widget on the sidebar. What’s more is the design itself is free of .css images.
On the other end of the spectrum, there’s the incredibly popular social media site, Mashable. Mashable too is fairly clean in terms of the design concept which features a white, minimalist look, and few images used in the theme’s appearance. However, Mashable has ads and social media widgets everywhere. There are even 45 RSS type links in the site’s footer. Maybe it’s just me, but I find Mashable to be one of the slowest loading sites that I’ve ever visited.
Related Posts and bounce rate
One aspect of Mashable’s design that you may have noticed, is that they make extensive use of thumbnails for related and interesting posts. Typically, there are 8 stories in the same category at the end of their posts along with trending topics spread horizontally above the blog’s footer.
Obviously, the idea behind this type of article promotion is to increase user page views. If you have ads on your site, more page views equals more potential revenue. At the same time, there’s the search engine benefit from decrease your website’s bounce rate. As well, the overall idea is to increase engagement with your blog’s readers.
Linkwithin vs. IGIT Related Posts
Okay, so the question you might be asking yourself, is first, how do I add related posts with thumbnails to my WordPress blog? Two of the more commonly used plugins include the and the IGIT Related Post plugins. Both are free and the end result is similar in appearance.
With the LinkWithin plugin, you can use it for multiple blogging platforms including Blogger while the IGIT plugin only works for WordPress. The LinkWithin plugin will include ads in the future with a revenue sharing option. As well, you’re forced to display the link for their site within the output of this plugin.
In contrast, with the IGIT related post plugin, you don’t have to display a link to their site nor do you have to provide your email address to a list. If you haven’t noticed yet, this site uses the IGIT related post plugin, so you can tell which one I prefer.
Features of IGIT Related Post plugin:
- Set thumbnail width and height
- Customize the heading text
- Select categories to exclude
- Set number of related posts to display
- Configure colors–background, hover, etc.
- Horizontal, vertical, or ‘raw’ formats
Rating: 4.5/5 – After a typical WordPress plugin installation, the only change that I had to make for this plugin was to change the thumbnail width to improve the layout. It’s worked well and I haven’t experienced a single problem with this plugin. Again, unless you want your site to have five minute load times like Mashable, you probably want to limit the number of plugins that you install for your blog. I haven’t noticed much of an effect on this site’s page load speeds.
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