Should I add new information to a company blog at the beginning or at the end of the article?
I'm writing a company blog and want to update one of our recent posts about our product's feature.
Should I add 2-3 paragraphs of update at the beginning or at the end of the post?
Great examples are welcome :)
P.S. The update is going to be visually distinguished from the original text.
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1 answer
Updates are generally at the beginning, but different styles are possible
The thing about updates in texts is that there are different ways you can do them and none of them is correct or incorrect. It mostly depends on your companies culture. Are there examples of how someone did it in the past? Is there a styleguide that dictates certain things so that your company has a consistent external image? Did you just do a relaunch of certain things and want to go with latest trends in certain designs or come up with a design principle of your own?
One possibility is to put updates at the beginning of a text. This helps readers who have already read the original text to quickly get an idea about what you changed and whether it's worth rereading the article.
You may also just update the description and not mention anything. Maybe adjust a version number somewhere in the title or a comment or somewhere near the name of the author so that people may see what changed. It can be a good idea to summarize changes at the end in that case. This may be preferred because the beginning looks consistent across multiple posts. There is not a weird block with editing notes and version numbers that do not really have anything to do with the product itself.
Another possibility would be to refrain from editing existing articles as best as you can. Just make a new article. That way it's clear from the order of publishing what happened when and which the newest version is. You can then make a little edit to put something like "This is an older version, see here for the newest update!" at the beginning of the older one to show readers who for example bookmarked the page where to find the newest information about the product.
All in all it boils down to your companies culture and the way you want to show yourself and your products to people reading the blog. When in doubt I would suggest to write a new article and change links on older versions. This may become troublesome if you have lots and lots of very little updates, in which case you may just want to change the "Last edited" or version number at the beginning and mention an edit history in the end. Look at how versioning is down here on StackExchange - that may give you an idea.
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