Weekly Post 6: 10/18/2021-10/24/2021

Although this week's reading was light, it helped me understand the importance of headlines and how they should capture the reader's attention. It was interesting reading the importance of headlines since I have never considered them significant when writing. This week reading made me reconsider many things that I have not before.

Since there were only two materials to read this week, I decide to read the article called “website Headlines: 3 Formulas that work for Homepages” by Peep Laja where he explained the best way to write a headlines for websites to sell a product or services rather than a portfolio. He also talks about how old headlines that stated unrealistic titles were now in the past and are no longer the attention grabbers for people today. I agree with Laja since many people no longer are going after such articles and are seeking headlines that are more relatable and directed toward them. Laja also stated that a goal when making headlines is to make the support bridge between the reader and yourself. So, if we do not build this bridge it would cause the readers to hardly read or look into the content we make no matter how interesting the content really is. Laja also explains how the headline should be direct and authentic as it should tell the reader what it is and what its purpose is. If it sounds fake it will not sell whatever product you are trying to sell to the readers. Overall, when selling a product or service the writer must be more careful of their headline as it will help them or hurt them from gaining any visitors to their website.

After reading the article, we were assigned to read chapter 8 of our class’ textbook in which it also talks about headlines and how they should grab the visitor’s attention when coming to our website. It if does not entice the people it means that the headline that the writers wrote is not significant enough to grab the reader's attention. For example, a headline is a book cover and the content we write is the story of the book. People will go towards a book with an interesting cover even if the story is bad. Whereas a book with a boring cover will hardly be picked up even if the story inside of it is the most interesting story a reader may have ever seen. In the same chapter it also explains that the writer should think about what keywords the audience may use when searching for our content. If one has many keywords, it is most likely the website will appear in a search engine and hopefully in the first few pages where the visitor will most likely visit. In conclusion, headlines help us lead readers to read our content.

In the end, learning about headlines and their importance was not something I expected to learn about in this course but it was a welcome lesson with lots of very valuable information. Before, I believed that headlines just needed to be big and relatable to the audience and that would somehow capture their attention. With this new information, I want to revisit some headlines I did in the past and rewrite them in order to better capture my readers attention. This week’s reading really changed my mind and made me reconsider many things and I hope to change my old habits on headlines to new ones so I can be better at grabbing my audience’s attention.