Long page or short pages?

Webweaving
1

I was just reformatting my /links page and thinking about sub-pages and what makes more sense. So… thoughts?

  • I wanna scroll! Give me long pages with section or summary tags!
  • I wanna click! Long pages make it harder to follow!
0 voters
1 Like
2

I like having a lot of content on one page, rather than going backwards and forwards between pages to get to different sections of similar content.

That being said, I feel like there’s definitely a limit to how much you want on one page. For example, my beer reviews page has ~460kB of HTML. :what: As a result, it takes a while to load (like, way too long), even on my speedy internet connection, so I’ve had to start thinking about ways to paginate or break up the page into multiple pages. (shoutout to @fLaMEd for helping me work through this!)

I don’t know what that limit is—depends on the type of content and how much of it there is, I suppose—but assuming everything is still loading quickly, I prefer having access to all the related content on one page. The Resources List for the Personal Web page here on Discourse is a good example of this, imo.

2 Likes
3

I like a well-structured long page, with headers and sub-headers and maybe a ToC at the top. Gives me a better idea of how much content there actually is in this specific section of your site as opposed to lots of clicking and choose-your-own-adventure style site navigation.

4

my preference is for long pages in most cases, and that preference is especially strong for resources like a links page. i often use Ctrl+F to find what i’m looking for, and it’s easier if i only have to search once.

5

“Page views” used to be an important metric for ad sales so sites would structure articles to get more clicks on more pages. I don’t see the need for it now.

Maybe if it’s a links page it makes sense to structure it like a directory.

6

I like this too. Links to subheadings at the top of the page, or filters with a little javascript to display this or that.

7

Agree with @hex . A long page that’s nicely formatted and contains a table of contents at the top is my preferred approach to solve this. Not a fan of many small pages at all.

But, like @Ravenous mentioned — there’s definitely a point where long becomes too long. In that case, I think a well structured “section front page” with an overview of all the different pages makes a lot of sense.

1 Like