That seems to be the catchcry of an increasing number of newspapers online. Have you noticed the amount of websites with numbered pages for long articles? Why have an article all on one page that users can easily read using the scroll wheel on their mouse or the arrow down/page down button when you can spread it across a number of pages, increasing the number of page impressions and showing more ads. The Age is just one example of this. When they did a recent complete redesign and went for a wonderful, full CSS layout (im talking over 12 months ago) I was very impressed – they were cutting edge, leaders in their field. Users, programmers and search engines all benefited from this. However, more recently they implemented a change so that rather than have a single page most articles now default to many pages. Caring for their users obviously comes second to making cash, despite the fact that users (ie readers) are their bread and butter, not advertisers….would anyone advertise if there were no readers?
Is google-chasing killing user experience?
Changing to a multipage format obviously makes The Age a more search engine friendly site too. Word in the search engine community is that google only indexes about 3 full screens worth of content per page, so anything more than this is wasted. Im sure becoming more google friendly is also behind the change. Multipage formats also mean that there is more pages available for google to index, which will also serve to increase their page rank. As more websites adopt this approach, I wonder if google will respond by changing the googlebot algorithm, as Google have regularly stated that in their quest to ‘organise the world’s information’, good user experience is essential.
well, first of all there are many benefits from which a short page is good:
1. printerfriendly
2. faster viewing ability, hence not much to download prior to read
3. more ads, with actually less ads on a site
4. usability! tests show, that long articles will be skipped. shorter texts or by splitting the texts will lead to better usability score.
5. etc.etc.etc.
i’m sure, that if you’d take the time to think the concept through, you’ll find many more pro-splitting arguments, than contra ones.
Appreciate your comments david…but i believe you are wrong.
1. Printer friendly? My printer handles multiple pages just fine, with the appropriate CSS i can even define where to put the page breaks. Generally speaking I think the pagination of my printer will handle the breaks better anyway and ill use less paper when I want to print the whole article - not to mention I will only have to hit the print button once, not once per page.
2. faster viewing/download? Id argue slower. Its quicker to download double the text on one page than download two or three times the text PLUS images/menus on more pages.
3. not sure of your argument on this one.
4. show me these usability tests? Ill agree that shorter texts are preferred on general websites - but on a newspaper website? I want the full article, not an abridged, written for the web version, or even worse, an article that is simply sliced in half.
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