So don’t break your heart for the digs and pings.Only thing readers or users want is free and unique things for them.

When making a website you should present either complicated articles with simple designs or easy-to-read articles with beautiful and detailed designs. This website is a perfect example. We provide you with information that requires you to think, however the design is very basic in itself and requires little focus. This way we get 90% of your focus instead of 30%.

All websites should add up to a certain complexity level. What is that level? I doubt we’ll ever know. The best thing we can do is take a calculated guess. A famous quote once was “Take calculated risks. This is quite different from being rash” and I feel the same applies to this discussion. Disbelievers who criticize that all viewers are different may be partially correct, however in essence they are wrong. Not all people are different as the majority of people can be divided into 3 groups. There are many sub-groups in which they are shown to be different, however the level of human instinct and basic psychology is still the same. The largest group covers approximately 60% of people and the second group covers 28% of people, while the third only covers around 2% of people at the most. Web authors should choose which of these groups they should appeal to.

While we are talking about simplification, let us also talk about assimilation. Addressing assimilation when writing articles can be critical to your success on the web. As the Web 2.0 era continues to grow and prosper, assimilation becomes ever so more critical. For those still s trying to understand what I’m trying to convey, consider this example. Digg is Web 2.0, Digg is popular, Digg gives you some top-notch quality articles. Now consider this, how does it give you such quality articles? By users of course. But why do these users vote for these articles? Because they can assimilate to them, meaning they can understand it and relate it either to their own thoughts or current activities (i.e. web design).

Many websites have criticized Digg because although their excellent and informative article may only get 9 diggs, funny pictures get over 3000 diggs. The reason lies in their content. Good content is important, but content that visitors can assimilate to is more important, in fact it should be 1st priority. People can assimilate to a funny image because it is easily understandable and interesting, whereas long informative articles are boring, take time to read, are complicated and often it is hard to concentrate on because of the distracting design (as beautiful as it may be).

After considering all the techniques talked about so far I would have to say Smashing Magazine has mastered and employed these techniques. They present clear and concise content with a simple design, assimilate to people’s needs and present complicated content (I.e. AJAX) in simple and clear ways. Each of their articles usually get at least 1500 diggs. There is much more to article writing than this however and I wish to point out that I’m simply explaining how you should present your information, not how you should write it.

@Smarmy – Thankyou for the comment. Obviously I was not amused but I will grudgingly admit that I may have deserved it. I did not simply make a post here because I wanted to advertise my website however and I’m sorry if you have got that impression. For this post and future posts I will not include my website.

I’ve personally never cared about Digg because I write too short posts. The big-list loving Digg crowd won’t like my small posts. As far as the Digg traffic is concerned, you could certainly gain too many new subscribers after reaching the Digg home page because Devlounge articles work like adhesive for a quality content loving person like me!

Hey Mitchell! I clicked onto your site and found neither stuff I had seen before nor anything interesting. I assume you commented here so you could become “popular.” It’s not working.

People want to see stuff they have never seen before or something that is interesting.

People don’t like try-hards

I have since:

- Subscribed to your feed
- Dugg the Article
- Wrote a Comment on the Digg Page
- Left a Comment here

So, Hello Devlounge. =D