[thelist] Single- or multiple-page articles?

Alex Bejoy Bejoy.Alex at blr.spcnl.co.in
Fri Jun 28 07:53:10 CDT 2002


 > I'm interested in your thoughts on whether online articles (reviews,
 > etc) are better represented as one long page, or as multiple shorter
 > pages. Any thoughts? Both from the perspective of the reader, and
 > that of the webmaster.

Hello,

It depends on the content mainly. If the content
can be separated into small sections dealing
with one particular topic that will be better
from the point of a reader. Because readers mostly
look for very specific information. And if an article
is split into pages, it will be helpful to have
a print page with all pages together. Environ-friendly
as well as usable!

A little bit on the topic from my experience.
I have an article on converting HTML to XHTML.
The medium-sized article is on changes to be
made to tags, attributes, images, scripts and
stylesheets for XHTML 1.0 Transitional
compliance.

Looking at the logs, I could see that people
coming to the site were looking for specific
information like "XHTML and stylesheets",
"XHTML and javascript", "XHTML and tables"
and so on, all of which are present in the
article, but maybe one or two screenfuls down.
Were my readers able to get the answers they
wanted?

I was not sure of the answer. Now I have
re-formatted the article separating sections
more specifically and also having a contents
section at the top with #hyperlinks so that
readers can directly go to the section of
their interest.

Article:
http://www22.brinkster.com/beeandnee/techzone/articles/htmltoxhtml.asp

Alternatively I have a Guide to E-mail
with tiny pages with a print-all page also.

Guide: http://www22.brinkster.com/beeandnee/beeguides/email/default.asp

HTH,

Bejoy



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