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In one section of a website I have a number of pages that, once upon a time, only had a few paragraphs (on different subjects) per page. Upon recent inspection I have realised that some of these pages are simply far too long and unwieldy and I would like to relocate *some* of the content from these pages, onto their own new page.
For example, one page has four articles about - Widget 1, Widget 2, Widget 3 and Widget 4. Widget 2 is actually a few hundred words long and would probably be more usable on its own page, leaving the other three items together on the original page.
So, my question is what might be the best way to deal with this? So far I have thought about leaving the original heading of Widget 2 and perhaps a one line description and simply linking to the new page and content with something like "this article can now be found here...".
Does that sound like a sensible way of doing it, or is there a more user friendly way of going about this?
Then, of course, the SEO part of my brain kicks in and wonders if I should really let sleeping dogs lie and not touch old content? Also, there is the question of direct links and users' bookmarks. - Wouldn't it be great to have some kind of partial 301 redirect for cases like this? ;)
Should I, perhaps, only apply this policy to new articles and simply accept that the old content is there and live with it?
So I recently have started doing this with some pages. Basically, I keep the original URL as a sort of doorway page and either keep the original intro material or rewrite it somewhat. Then the other pieces of the article go on subpages. Each page on the article gets a box of some sort (side bar, floated div) with a "table of contents" so that from any point, the reader can get to any point, and each new article has some nice, descriptive anchor text.
It's more or less the way cnet, pcmag, devshed and sites that tend to put long articles online do it.
If it's merely a two-part article, I would do it more the way the NYT and Newseek do it for 2-3 part pieces, which to put link text at the bottom of each page to take you to the next one. This is analoguous to the way it's done in print media as well with some nice teaser text to get you to flip the page.
Now that I think of it, though, I try to do both - table of contents high on the page floated for quick navigation, and teaser text at the bottom of the article to get people to "turn the page".
