I’ve been looking back at the earlier stuff I made for my 100 mountains of Yamagata project, such as my first Mt. Kinbo article, and I’ve noticed a whole lot of areas that need improvement. In essence, they need to be more easily navigable.

Medium has taught me the importance of headlines. Walls of text can be off putting, but breaking it up with photos and headlines I feel is a good way to keep things interesting, and also give the reader what they want.

This is the nature of blogging and websites these days as honestly I don’t expect many people to read every word. Obviously I would be happy if they were to do so, but I don’t think it’s realistic, and nor do I think it should be. People want the necessary information first, not a huge narrative (recipe pages are a huge culprit of this).

With that in mind, I’ve made a couple of changes to the layout of my articles, as is reflected in the recent Mt. Shogadake article. Now I purposely start out with the necessary stuff like a simple explanation of what makes the mountain worth visiting, and then an explanation of the trails, rather than a long story about my experience, that comes after.

I think these short introductions at the start are the most helpful way to go about it because people will be able to tell from the get go whether climbing the mountain is worth it or not for them. If it is, then they can continue on to the narrative I’ve written, where hopefully they will catch some hints on how they too can make a trip to the mountain worthwhile.

All this is to say, I’m going to be going back and fixing my earlier articles to reflect this change in thinking. Thankfully I’ve only climbed eight mountains so far, of which I’ve published 6 articles on. Best to get this out of the way as soon as possible.