[thelist] Advice on page format

[Rebecca O Connell]

I am the webmaster of a small departmental website.  I have an
Administrative page that starts with a list of all the available forms.  The
forms are each linked to a blurb further down the page that has the form's
name, a paragraph describing what to do with the form, and links to .pdf and
.doc (or .xls) versions of the form. The page has gotten very large, and I
want to split it up into one main page, with the list, and three subpages,
with the blurbs and form links.

My problem is, right now these links send the viewer further down the same
page.  If I divide the page up and point the links to where the blurb is
people may not realize they've been sent to a new page, and get confused
(especially since the thing they're looking at used to be on the same page).
If I point all of the links to the top of the appropriate page the
appropriate blurb may be 'below the fold', also causing confusion.

I could point the link to the top of the appropriate page and then have
another list of forms at the top of the new page (it would be a short list,
so they should be able to find their form) but then they would have to click
on the same link twice to get where they're going.

I could have links to the new subpages with no links to specific forms, but
people won't be able to tell if we have the form they need or not, and may
not bother to click through and check.

Or I could have links to the new pages followed by unlinked lists of the
forms that are on the new pages, but I'm afraid this is going to be
confusing and annoying, since are used to getting to the forms directly from
this part of the page.

I would appreciate any suggestions for a good compromised measure that will
allow the page to grow as our bureaucracy grows.  If anyone is interested,
the present page can be seen at http://www.mse.ncsu.edu/administrative.html.

Thanks in advance,
Rebecca