Page Length and Anchor Links -- Your Take

February 16, 2004 | 18 Comments

A common problem when working on the information architecture of a Web site is how, and when, to break up content into multiple pages and when not to. At some point, with almost every project, it seems like there is a section or bits of related information that just seems to belong together, but not long enough to warrant a page for each bit.

These “tweeners” can pose a challenging problem.

How long is too long? How important is it that like information stay together on one page? These questions and many others seem to pop up with great frequency.

I recently shortened the length of my front page here at Asterisk* quite a bit. I went from displaying seven full posts to three posts and a list of links. I did this because I felt the page was much too long. I turns out the users I tested the site with agreed with me. Some might argue that it’s still too long.

I’ve also recently been working on a project that has quite a bit of information that needs to be presented in an almost linear fashion. I was able to put into place an IA of a sort, but at some points the “traditional” structure I was using broke down and I was left with some pages that were fairly long but not long enough to warrant being broken out. Doing so would have disrupted the linear flow of the content.

I put into place some anchor links, which I’ve found work well on long pages with long passages of text. In this particular case there were some sections that were fairly short and others that were rather long. It makes for a rather uneven user experience when one is jumping down the page as it’s often not totally clear which anchor the user is supposed to land on.

I’m thinking about using a technique similar to the one Andy came up with, and I think that may work well. I’ll be very interested to see how it pans out. While working out ideas for a solution to this problem, I got to thinking about anchor links and page length in general.

I’ve read that users don’t mind scrolling as much as I used to think they did. I’ve also seen this to be the case in my own observation of users — surprising, really, although I don’t know why. I’ve always preferred longer pages, why would that be any different for most users?

The now defunct (too sad) Web Monkey is a prime example. I used to always just hit the print version of an article so I could get the whole thing on one page.

On the other hand, it’s also obvious to me that there are times when a page can be too long. For example if there were multiple articles on one page, like the way many blog homepages work. Some are just too darn long, although I’ve yet to see (or remember seeing) one with anchor links.

So what do you think of anchor links? When is a page too long in your mind? It there a general rule you follow when breaking up content, or does it depend on the site? Do you mind scrolling or would you rather long passages of content be broken up into pages? What do you think of the length of Asterisk’s homepage now? Do you use “back to top” links?

What’s your take on page length and anchor links?

Filed under: Web Design

Comments

1. Chris said:

Instead of using Javascript to highlight a targeted anchor, why not use the css :target psuedoclass?

Posted on February 16, 2004 08:29 PM | #

2. Chris Vincent said:

I used to do the exact same thing when reading Webmonkey articles. Funny. :)

I think the ideal length of the page really depends on the content. For example, the last thing I want to do is have my attention broken while reading about some new concept, as is the case with O’Reilly and Webmonkey articles. Simple headings should be used to break what would normally be pages.

However, if the content is disjointed, as is the case on blogs, paging is a necessity. Of course, there’s always the possibility of letting the user set a preference for how much content to display per page, the way Google does search results.

It’s interesting to think about how anchors might be applied to remedy the problem of long pages. Perhaps at the top of the sidebar, there could be a list of anchors to articles in the lower recesses of the page, labeled “on this page”, or something similar. Some user testing on such a mechanism would surely be useful.

“Back to top” links are nice when every site has them and you are used to them, but that’s not the case; perhaps browsers should implement “back to top”. Well, nevermind; extended keyboards have the “Home” button. I should start using that more often. :P

I think your front page is a nice length, but I’m a little biased; I do pretty much the same thing on my blog. ;)

Posted on February 16, 2004 11:26 PM | #

3. andreas said:

Personally, I find that reading articles is more convenient when you have the whole text on one page. Scrolling with the mouse wheel is just smoother and more controlled than hitting a “next page” button.

On the other hand, when I observe less tech-oriented web users (like my father, for example) they often don’t seem to use the mouse wheel at all, even if they have one. So scrolling for them must be really awkward.

On my site I have a couple of long pages. Some are tutorials which I found would be disrupted by splitting them up into several pages. Moreover, that would have meant adding yet another sublayer to the IA.

I tried to solve the problem by indicating with an icon which links point to page-internal anchors and supplying a “back to top” link at each point that is linked to.

A very good solution in my view would be similar to that printer-friendly page you were talking about: offer the user the possibility to choose how many chunks they want to have. One could even imagine saving the choice in a cookie.

I don’t know how this could be done technically but it seems the best way to me.

Posted on February 16, 2004 11:41 PM | #

4. Dave Meehan said:

I pretty much hate the current endless blog style of homepages. It doesn’t make sense. If I have regular readers, they pretty much only need to see the latest entry, and irregular readers probably don’t want to read every entry, just those most relevant to them. How many new blog readers bother going much beyond the first page or two? To solve this I adopted a news style format for my own blog (www.orificeworld.com) that gives summaries and decreasing precedence to articles by age. The overall appearance is a whole month of entries, meaning that new readers can dip right in on something relevant to them, and access the archives by month as well. I’ve not had time to really finish this off, but its close to what I consider a good balance between content and page length.

Posted on February 17, 2004 12:35 AM | #

5. Matt Southerden said:

I also agree that I prefer articles to be presented on a single page. However, it is also of consideration to what the search engines make of it. Say you split your article over 5 pages. That also means that the key words in your article are split over 5 pages, possibly lowering the correlation the engine thinks your article bares to a specific search term.

This is also the reason that people get bizarre search references to their blogs. Having 5 or 6 unrelated and off the wall blog entries on each page can give some strange rankings in Google (Dunstan for example seems to have very diverse topics for many posts).

Regards,

Matt. :-)

Posted on February 17, 2004 01:16 AM | #

6. Patrick Griffiths said:

Regarding the comment that users don’t mind scrolling as much you used to think they did, I think that is more of a case of users being more used to the mechanism now than they were years ago.

Whereas ageing studies claim that information above the fold is of utmost importance, these kind of statements seem to be based on web use analysis from many moons ago. I think it used to be the case that people really didn’t like scrolling but nowadays as more people are more used to the web it has become second nature.

Posted on February 17, 2004 03:05 AM | #

7. Ste Grainer said:

Long pages are fine with me, so long as all the content is related (like a single article). I sometimes get annoyed with Wired’s news story templates because it’s not immediately obvious if there are two pages or just one for a given article. Maybe that’s just me, though - looking again, I noticed for the first time that the Page 1 of 2 text appears at both the top and bottom of the article (I had only seen it at the bottom before).

Personally, I never use Back to Top links, but I always use a 5-button mouse so I just generally use the Back button on the mouse instead. I do put them in every page with anchored sections for those who prefer using them, though.

What annoys me most about anchored sections isn’t the broken navigation that it sometimes creates but rather the confusion that can arise when anchors are near the bottom of the page. It seems to me like browsers (or perhaps this is the designer’s responsibility) should add extra space at the bottom of anchored pages so that an anchored section will appear at the top of the window when it is linked to. (I’m still not quite awake yet, so I’m not sure if this makes sense.) I think Andy’s solution does go some ways towards solving thing problem, but in the case of the last one or two anchored sections in a page, the user still has to scan a few lines/paragraphs sometimes in order to find the section they really meant to see. Is it so wrong to add a bottom margin of rough 8-10 ems to the body to ensure that an anchored section will load at the top of the browsing window?

Posted on February 17, 2004 03:39 AM | #

8. Richard Rutter said:

Long pages definitely do it for me, especially if they are one tutorial or article. Easier to save to disk, print out and easier read (for those of us who have discovered mouse wheels or PageUp/PageDown buttons).

I remember the feelings of ‘at last!’ when A List Apart finally started to put its articles on a single page.

As for blog home pages - that’s a very particular case. I think it’s too simplistic to say that regular readers need only to see the latest entry and everyone else only needs the relevent entry. If I discover a blog I like the look of, I find it preferable to browse through the latest ten or so entries to see what the reader has been saying recently. Easier than clicking links one-by-one in an archive.

As for asterisk*, well I’d say show the latest five entries thus matching the Latest Five Entries in the sidebar (not that there’s any great reasoning in that statement, it just seems to make some sense to me).

Posted on February 17, 2004 04:18 AM | #

9. Roger said:

Unless an article/tutorial/story is very long, I definitely prefer scrolling. How long would be too long? I guess when it starts slowing my web browser down, which is… many, many pages.

When reading articles on Webmonkey, I also went straight for the print version just to get everything on one page.

Weblogs, on the other hand, can have home pages that feel a bit too long to me. When I started my own weblog, I kept a full month of posts on the home page. I’ve since reduced the number of posts several times, and for now I’ve set it to 5, which feels OK to me.

About anchors: I find them useful for bookmarking or linking to a specific part of a long document. And using :target is a great way to highlight the targeted anchor.

Posted on February 17, 2004 05:17 AM | #

10. Richard Allsebrook said:

Why not leave that decision up to your users?

Ultimately you can’t please all the people all the time if you pick one method over the other but you CAN please them all if you let them choose which display method they prefer.

Of course, this solution is only realy practical if you are dynamically generating your content.

Posted on February 17, 2004 05:31 AM | #

11. Joel said:

I find blogs that have a single day’s entry on a separate page very annoying, particularly when that entry is just a sentence. This is allowing blogging software to dictate.

Part of the genre of an online journal is chronological order, what you say today often follows on from what you said yesterday. I dislike blogging software that divides posts into artificially constructed topics that disrupt chronological order, taking a post out of context and putting it on its own page.

So for my own journal I prefer having a month’s worth on a single page, even though it can result in long pages. However, if you post a lot of images and this makes page loading time too long on a modem, then this isn’t much good. There are excellent blogs I find I don’t visit as often as I might do simply because they post so many images all on the same page, for example Rageboy, who is a great writer but those pages are loading forever:

http://www.rageboy.com/blogger.html

So, because I want a month on one page, I am careful not to post too many images on the page, linking to them if necessary.

There are other reasons to have a complete text on one page, such as the ability to search it in its entirety. I’m thinking more literary texts here, things people might *want* to search.

The recent discussion on whitespace about there being a 101 k cut-off point when Google indexes a page was an eyeopener (possibly it prompted this debate here?).

One thing I can’t stand, blogs where you get a couple of short paragraphs and then there is a “continue” link. That’s so tiresome.

There’s another aspect to long pages. They can result in some interesting random Google searches coming your way, in that there is a much wider selection of words on a long page that acts like a spider’s web to catch flies looking for ridiculous things. That they come anyway when the snippet shows it’s not what they were looking for suggests searchers are fickle/enlightened enough to be introduced to new things. Rather like the concept of a “strange attractor”. Short pages generally attract only on-topic searches. I can understand some people would have no complaint about that.

Posted on February 17, 2004 06:43 AM | #

12. Jeremy Flint said:

I think a “happy medium” has to be discovered when dealing with page links. The target user of a site is also a factor. On the one hand, a really long page can be a pain to read through because of all the scrolling. On the other hand, breaking up a page can anger some who may want to be able to print the content without having to print 4 seperate pages.

I am in favor of anchor links personally. I don’t like having to read 4 pages of text, then have to backup through those pages to get back to my point of origin.

I too struggle with the length of my site. I try to archive often, but even then I am just throwing them in to one archive page, so it is terribly long.

I like the way zeldman preserves the length of his site, similar to how keith does.

Posted on February 17, 2004 06:48 AM | #

13. Chris Hester said:

“The now defunct (too sad) Web Monkey” - What do you mean? Do you know something we don’t?

I prefer to see the full-length of posts on a page, so long as it doesn’t carry on forever. I don’t like Dunstan’s approach on 1976 Design where only snippets are given - it means an extra link to see the full post. Even if I return days later, I still might want to read the earlier posts again.

On my website I have some PHP that gives me the last two months’ worth of posts. But if there’s too much text, I’ve added a variable to show posts from a set number of months only - either 1 or 2. So sometimes 1 is enough.

Obviously when a new month comes along, I don’t want the site to show a blank page if there are no posts for that month yet, so I keep the display under manual control. (I did write a script to automate the months for me, until I realised how silly that would be - if you didn’t post anything for 2 months, your main-page content would disappear!)

I’d like to see wider blogs. I hate the narrowness of the new A List Apart. Often lines of code spill out into the sidebar, like the comments text box does here in Mozilla. This page of comments is a lot of scrolling already, yet there is ‘wasted’ space at both sides. But then we’re into a liquid-versus-fixed layout debate there! :-)

Posted on February 17, 2004 07:35 AM | #

14. Scrivs said:

Chris: Webmonkey is dead now.

I broke up my home page because I found many times when you have long entries, like you write Keith, many times people will just forget about the entries that are below the fold and this sometimes could stop a conversation that may have continued on for some time. I am the type to very rarely go back and read old entries anyways though, so it just goes to show there is no right or wrong way.

Posted on February 17, 2004 08:56 AM | #

15. Nick Finck said:

When I was working on A List Apart with Jeffrey Zeldman we ran into the same issue. If you recall the old articles used to span over a series of pages. I think Jeffrey had about 2 or 3 screens per page max.

When I started helping with the development he had requested that I break the articles into multiple pages but not clearly stating how many screens to set the breaking point at.

I ended up building an article with about 4 or 5 screens per page. We had some discussion about it and eventually Jeffrey decided to put the full article on one page with the exceptions of code samples and the like.

Digital Web Magazine does the same thing for it’s articles so I was probably influenced by the way I handeled my site when it came to development for ALA.

One thing that I changed recently was moving the blog from the /new/ folder to the home page. Doing this caused a lot of scrolling and 2 unballanced columns that sat side by side on the home page. I decided to cut the number of posts down to about 5… which, given the frequencey and length of each post, can lead to new posts getting nudged off the home page pretty quickly.

I guess the way I figure it is, if it’s more than a day old it’s old news anyway. I mean, most of the content we publish on our news blogs can be found on other blogs as well regaurdless of who posted the news first.

All in all, keep the home page reglativly short and sweet, keep the articles as single pages, and keep the blog posts current for the blog home page. That’s my 2 cents.

Posted on February 17, 2004 11:45 AM | #

16. patrick h. lauke said:

i prefer to scroll, if the information is all related and relevant, and can’t be easily broken up.

in a similar way, i hate all the usual arguments about what is and isn’t “below the fold”. this is the web, after all, not print. give the users some credit that they know how to work a scrollbar. (sorry, not directing this at you in particular, but at the zealots who go on about “important stuff needs to be right at the top”, and in the same breath say that that’s why banner adverts etc need to be at the top…and fail to see the irony that, BECAUSE of banner ads etc, users are actually MORE inclined to scroll slightly below the fold and ignore a lot of attention-grabbing things at the top…or is it just me ?)

anyway, i found this older article quite interesting - it makes the case for scrolling, with user testing results.

Posted on February 17, 2004 02:20 PM | #

17. Max said:

The International Herald Tribune site has a nice little solution. They offer you the option of seeing the entire article, letting you scroll down the page to read it, or using pagination to read it.

I’m sure most have seen it before, but it’s very neat. The code for it can be found at the smoking gun.

Posted on February 17, 2004 02:47 PM | #