Your opinions on page layout...long pages or multiple pages.

[Sandra]

Hi everyone,

What are your opinions about page layout? I'm looking at it from a visual standpoint, useability, and SEO.

Which is better, having pages that are long where the user scrolls down, or a link style where the articles are summarized with a link to another page with the article?

You can see an example of this on ediets. On the home page, www.ediets.com there are summaries of the different sections of the site. Then if you go to news, for example, www.ediets.com/news/ there is another newspaper type layout.

This type of layout makes it easy for the visitor to see what all is offered at the site. They can choose the topics they want to read on. If all these articles were on the same page you'd have to keep scrolling and scrolling. There might be an article a visitor wants to read, but if they get tired of scrolling they will not find it.

Plus I would imagine this type of layout would be ideal from an SEO perspective. You separate each article on a separate page and optimize those keywords.

Now the thing that I find odd though is this - If you click on one of the articles you go to that article's page. But they usually spread this article over 2-3 webpages, so you have to click "next" or 1, 2, 3. At this point I get tired of clicking. Are there any advantages to spreading an article over several pages?

Any opinions

Sandra

[KimD]

[webturtle]

Good questions. There is (as usual) not always a "right" way because there are a lot of factors to consider in the content of an individual site. It the opinion of many, including myself, that shorter, "chunked" information works better for the purpose of usability and readability on the web. And of course, by dividing up the content by topic you can optimize pages to specific SEO. As to your last question, I can think of no good reason to break up a long article across multiple pages except that its long and someone felt that was necessary. Truly though, that would be the one time I'd probably just opt for a longer page!

My views on usability and hypertext design don't necessarily jive with all perspectives - for example, the standard sales letter is usually many screens longer than anything I'd ever come up with. But from what I've been told there is a whole art behind copy editing those long sales letters, so I accept it as an exception!

Along with my tendency for pages that are no longer than one "page" (a screen full, roughly the same as one page of MS Word), when I develop sites, I try to provide multiple navigations and multiple ways that someone can access the information. A standard top level navigation and sublevel navigation to break up the sections of the site, of course. And usually a site map for people who want to browse all of the available sections - if its a large site, I tend to go three layers deep and no more. If it makes sense, search functionality for people who want to really target specific terms. I also do a fair amount of cross linking - one page or topic available from multiple directions, as relevant. Kim's observation is a good one also - scrolling is difficult for many people. I have "mouse shoulder" - after so many years of mousing around and a bad rotator cuff tear a few years ago, it pains me to scroll. So, I have a wheel mouse and that helps, but still, the more clicking I can do with the flick of a wrist to move around, the better.

Hope this helps a little - one web designer's opinion

Eileen 'Turtle' Parzek

[karadawn]

[Steve Gill]

[Guest]

[Sandra]

[webturtle]

[Sandra]

[OpenSouls.com]