A User-Friendly Way to Showcase Expert Advice

I read a lot of advice-from-experts blog posts and notice that most of them require scrolling down past a bunch of adds to see all the advice. I thought the following blog post has an interesting way of showcasing expert advice.

Marco Mijatovic at FirstSiteGuide.com reached out to me and other bloggers to share our best blogging tips.  I was more than happy to comply.  Marco compiled the responses (after herding 55 blogger-cats) into a post: 55 Marketing Experts Reveal 3 Best Blogging Tips. As a good content marketer, he followed up with all the bloggers and asked us to share it with our networks. I was more than happy to do that, but not before checking out the blog post.

Initially…

The blog post was nicely done! They converted our photos into digitally re-imaged head-shots. A nice touch that gives the site a unique feel! The text is nicely spaced. Tips are categorized in #1, #2 and #3 for easy reading.

With 55 experts, it’s obviously a very long post and readers need to keep scrolling down. It seemed to take forever to get through all the scrolling down. I couldn’t help thinking about the movie, “Are We There Yet?” Which led me to think it might have been more effective to split this into two blog posts.

Two weeks later…

I received e-mail from Marco informing me that there had been some design changes to the post. They put the photo images of bloggers at the beginning of the blog post.

Hovering over an image reveals the name of the expert and clicking on it will take you directly to their tips. I like this change a lot.

I love the change. It eliminates much of the scrolling that users had to do previously to get through the article.

It’s easy to write a long blog post just for desktop format without worrying too much about design. With the rise of mobile devices and smaller form factor devices, design and UX will play a more important role in the future content marketing efforts. This is one great example of recognizing the needs of different form factors.