Deciding When and How to Carry an Article on to a New Page

Breaking up page length in a web site article ands how to link.

[bouncybunny]

I'm starting a new site and, having tried various different methods on my previous sites, I'm hoping to do the right thing this time as regards page and article length.

Now, I'm aware that there is no one correct answer for every situation.

With that in mind, I am interested in:

1. what criteria other people use when deciding at what point to break a longer article up into a new page.

and

2. When splitting an article into another page, what is the best method for leading the visitor to that next page? A single link at the end of each page? Breadcrumb trails along the top? Navigation links in the sidebar?

[tonynoriega]

if you gather stats from your site, i.e. Google Analytics, check to see what the biggest percentage of resolution is used by your visitors. mine for instance is abot 52% of 1024x768 so i try to keep my pages within that realm height wise.

articles are a bit different, but nevertheless, people still have a hard time with too much scrolling.

my monitor is 1280x1024 so i can see a bit more.

when i read, write or design article based pages ... (im not a writer so keep that in mind) i break my articles up into chunks. easy to read quick paragraphs, separated by an even smaller piece i call a "nuglet". when you reader gets done with that first paragraph, they want a quick sentence or two, that they can digest real fast, then back on to the article. maybe a quote, bold or italicized nuglet.

hopefully your header graphic isnt too high and you dont have your content starting already halfway down the page.

as far as the next pages are concerned.. you have to let your readers know whats beyond the first page if it spans mulitple pages..

i.e. Page 2, 3, 4

i have never been a fan of "continue" or "read more" links... too vague and i need to know what im getting into... do i want to continue reading?

end your pages with something compelling that is addressed on the next page...

i.e. "Why do web developers get so aggressive about the development language they love so much?..."

(that my not be compelling to some, but some of us here might keep reading)

my 2 cents.

[ergophobe]

Something I'm grappling with as well. A couple of observations. No real solutions yet. No testing yet. Just trying to figure out what seems to work just for me even, let alone for visitors.

- most of the online authors I actually read regularly and repeatedly have a tendency to less frequently buy massively long articles - 1500 to 5000 words regularly (I'm thinking Paul Graham, Joel Spolsky). If he can, Joel Spolsky breaks it up after a couple thousand words when the topic can logically be divided. That runs counter to the common advice to keep articles to 500 words, but for many reasons I just don't buy that advice. Long pages are, in my opinion, fine, as long as you generally don't have screenful after screenful of text without subheadings (like tony says).

- no matter how long the pages are, divide up the screen with subheadings and bold and so forth. I think if you do that, you can go quite long, perhaps with internal links for the page itself.

- I've started using the drupal book module. So basically you end up with a hierarchy like

- site
-- category
---- topic1
------ page 1
------ page 2
------ page 3
---- topic2
------ page 1
------ page 2
------ page 3

How I divide the topic depends on overall length and how well the pages stand alone. I like each page to be a sensible subtopic, like a minichapter in a book, not a random break, so length is variable.

I'm still experimenting with the linking, but in general
- the bottom of the page has "next/previous" links that use the page title as anchor text
- the "book" gets a "table of contents" as a box in the upper right of the page with page titles as subject sections. Not sure that's a good spot...

I would like to have more custom next/prev links like Tony suggests, but I haven't really looked into it with the book module.

I have to emphasize that this is based on how *I* like to read, adjusted based on a bit of SWBNUT [note 1] and may well be terrible design. I'm just figuring out what seems like it *might* work and will futz around.

*note 1: Spousal Walkby Navigational Usability Testing. "Sweetie, can you figure out how to get from this page to the next one?" "Quick, which page do you think you're on?"

[bouncybunny]

Thanks folks, that's all helpful.

Of course, so much of this is personal preference, so it's good to hear your comments.

[vincevincevince]

To confuse things further - I have a positive dislike of article sites which don't have a good amount of vertical scrolling. I habitually use the top of the browser window as a 'line mark' - I read the line immediately below it, then scroll by one line. To me, it is easier to read like that.

[PennyM]

It may be helpful to see if there is a natural change or continuation in the article for additional pages to be needed.

For example, if the article is about dog grooming and you have the subtopics of "Techniques", "Supplies Needed", and"How-to", those may be natural (and good) places to go to an additional page, depending on how much content you have about each subheading. Of course, if you have strong (possibly lengthy) content subtopics within one article, it may be worth considering to make the subtopics their own pages.

The suggestion to describe what's on the next page is good...give the visitor a reason to continue reading!

[vincevincevince]

If page breaks are at natural breaks, it can be an effective place to incorporate contextual advertising. You can present the user with a choice of:

Next page

Ad one

Ad two

Ad three

It's then in the 'line of reading'; and the fact that the next page would need a new page load makes it just as convenient to click an appealing ad as it does to read on.

[pageoneresults]

I might use a <ul> at the bottom of the article with

display:inline

set via CSS. Or, I may just leave it as

display:block

, depends on the layout.

Within that <ul>, I'll delink the page they are on so there is a visual reference showing where they are in the article.

Another thing I'll do for user agents is provide link relationship elements to "bind" the article.

<link rel="start" href="link-reference">
<link rel="next" href="link-reference">
<link rel="prev" href="link-reference">
<link rel="glossary" href="link-reference">
<link rel="chapter" href="link-reference">
<link rel="bookmark" href="link-reference">

The above are just a few that I might use regularly when constructing multi page documents. ;)

[tonynoriega]

This would be a good area to do some testing...

maybe set up a few of the "top" articles in a different fashion.

lengthy pages with a heafty amount of scrolling, using whatever format you like to break up the paragraphs...

then a short page with a few paragrahs and more navigation to get them to read through the article..

see which one perfoms better.

might be interesting to see what happens.

[pageoneresults]

I can't say for certain but it seems that one of the side effects of using the link relationship element has been an overabundance of indented listings. I have no hard evidence to support this statement other than a consistent indented SERP where these elements are being utilized on the sites that I manage.

[reprint]

Why not provide both views of an article? This is what I do in joomla. At the top of the article the reader has a choice to view the whole article and scroll or see it spread across several pages each of which have a title so they can skip to the relevant part if they like.
My default view is spread across several pages

[tonynoriega]

you should record your voice reading it and offer a audio version too... that way those who are too lazy to scroll or click a few links can just sit back and listen to your voice...

make sure your optimize your voice for search engines... speak slowly, speak key terms, at each header make sure you say "header 1...", and speak the anchor text too...

[reprint]

Tony, you laugh now but have you seen Google Labs Audio Indexing experiment? Not as far fetched as you may think!

[tonynoriega]

i know... thats whats scary... when audio will implement itself as part of the algo's...

will proper spoken english be taken into account? or will be only KW's that are considered? proper sentences? proper usage of tense and or passive voices or not?

time will tell..

[ergophobe]

And will it know whether that word you're saying so emphatically is b, i, em or strong? ;-)

[tonynoriega]

hmmm... strong or b could be measured by the increase of influx of voice...

i or em...?...maybe if you tilt your head?

will it take your slang and recommend a proper word instead?

"Did you mean: ..."