WebHints: Design: Try To Keep Pages Short

Pages should be kept short. Short pages have many advantages:

Loading time: Long pages take longer to load. Sometimes much longer.

Navigation: The page is the navigational unit. To fully exploit the benefits of hypertext, you should limit each page to a single concept.

Referencing: If you split a long page into smaller pages, people can bookmark the smaller pages on specific topics they're interested in. They can't do that if it's all one one huge page.

Logging: If you split a long page into smaller pages, the user's traversal of the smaller pages will appear as a run of separate hits in the webserver log file and you'll be able to see how much (and which parts) of the document they're reading.

An exception is when a web page is supposed to contain a complete document. In these cases, it's often best to leave the document in a single page so that people can save a copy on their local disk using a single File.SaveAs operation.

Here's an interesting quote:

"Only 10% of users scroll beyond the information that is visible on the screen when a page comes up. All critical content and navigation options should be on the top part of the page."
--- A column by Jacob Nielsen.

If this statistic is true, it's a dire warning not to make critical pages (e.g. home pages) much longer than a screen. If you do, put all the important stuff on the first screen.


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