I have been toying with the pro's and con's of shortening blog posts on the main page with a "Continue Reading ..." break. On the one hand it does make the main page more uniform, shorter to scroll, faster to load and tidier looking, but on the other hand if people have to click to read a blog post, will they? I worry I will get less readership if each post has to be manually opened to be seen. What are your thoughts?
It depends how much you post and how many posts will be on the first page. You certainly don't want "spammy sales page length". On my most active blog, I have 12 posts on the first page, and some days I post 2-3 times, so I do use excerpts, but for say, one category, or once a day, or every few days posting..3-4 full articles is not too bad. I think anything more thatn that should use excerpts. A lot of it also depends on the theme, and how your posts are displayed. That is just my opinion.
I generally use excerpts to avoid issues of duplicate content between the main page and the post specific page.
I just made the swaitch to shortened posts on my home page and I think it looks more professiuonakl and I have actually noticed an increase in lenghth of time on my site
If your blog has multiple posts a day exerts are a good idea. If it's usually at about 1 a day I would say full posts should be fine.
It depends on your template. Some templates looks better with excerpt, while some not. Homepage excerpt also would be useful to prevent duplicate post penalty by google.
I personally use post excerpts on my homepage to attract my visitors to read my other recent posts. Here is a post at Daily Blog TIps that somehow can you a better idea on what to choose - http://www.dailyblogtips.com/post-excerpts-on-the-homepage/