[thelist] Single- or multiple-page articles?

Jonathan_A_McPherson at rl.gov Jonathan_A_McPherson at rl.gov
Thu Jun 27 09:21:04 CDT 2002


I too much prefer single-page articles. I like the fact that they
* are easier to navigate;
* are easier to print properly;
* load faster (no waiting between pages); and
* are easier to maintain;

However, I think that multi-page articles have their place -- and that is
when you have extremely long articles that have a lot of graphics and other
heavy downloads on them.

I recently read this article at Tom's Hardware:
http://www.tomshardware.com/mobile/02q2/020408/index.html

Can you imagine that entire thing crammed onto one page? (Note that the TOC
at the end of the article contains links to sections of the article; there
are quite a bit more pages than sections).

For huge articles, it makes sense to break them down into a few _titled_
sections. But for everything else, I much prefer a single-page view.

--
Jonathan McPherson, LMIT/SD&I
Software Engineer & Web Systems Analyst
email / jonathan_a_mcpherson at rl dot gov

-----Original Message-----
From: ashiel at sportsinteraction.com [mailto:ashiel at sportsinteraction.com]
Sent: Thursday, June 27, 2002 6:37 AM
To: thelist at lists.evolt.org
Subject: Re: [thelist] Single- or multiple-page articles?


At 21:05 26/06/2002 -0500, Joel Konkle-Parker wrote:

>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.

   As a reader, I prefer a single page. This may be because coming from a
unix background, I have an aversion to the mouse, and don't like to click
much while using the web. There's also that annoying delay as the next page
loads, and if the connection is slow, I can often completely lose the
thread of the article.

   As a webmaster, I also prefer the single page - it's simpler to code,
easier to link to, and I think it makes customers happier.

   I suspect that the only real reason to use multiple pages is to get more
advertising spaces.

   Drew.



Drew Shiel                               webmaster at swiftpay.com
                                                     +353-1-2365705
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Swiftpay -- The best way to pay online -- http://www.swiftpay.com

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