Clicks and page length

mouse clicks and html page length

[fctoma]

Question for all you pro's out there with a few years experience. Well, two questions:

1. When someone you're designing a site for says "I don't want any page more than 3 clicks away"... what do you tell them?

2. Page length... What is "too long" of a page from your design experience?

ANY Feedback much appreciated!

[txbakers]

1. When someone you're designing a site for says "I don't want any page more than 3 clicks away"... what do you tell them?

I tell them I will design it so that no page is more than three clicks away. This is very doable. I have a site with over 400 screens where this is true.

2. Page length... What is "too long" of a page from your design experience?

Ideally it should fit in one screen. I don't like horizontal scrolling, vertical scrolling is OK for a little bit.

However, if the page is a list of stuff from a database, then the page can be as long as it needs to be.

[thehittmann]

I agree with tx. If you have a site map on your index page nothing should be further than 2 clicks away.

And on the other issue horizontal scrolling is annoying and should be avoided. Vertical scrolling I have no problem with at all. But if it goes on for too long it should be split into more than one page IMO.

[fctoma]

Thanks for the info... I completely agree with the 3 clicks to any page, and absolutely no horizontal scroll bars.

I appreciated your feedback!

So, is there anything you've seen that has "global" guidelines on what is too long for a page (vertical), or how long is too long. We have a few pages on our site, 99% being two page/screen lengths in size. There are a few technical pages like [lpd.brooksnet.com...] that go three screens.... what do you think? Too long? Or, ok.

Thank you again and have a great day.

[txbakers]

I have an informational site, with all of the information in a database. When a user requests a listing of stuff for a category, I won't split the page, even if there are 1000 results. It's more of a nuisance to find it on several pages than to just scroll down.

[thehittmann]

1000 results? google doesnt have a problem with this? I thought that google didn't index anymore than 100 results. I would think a page with 1000 links would be called a link farm and be penalized by SE's

[txbakers]

1000 results? google doesnt have a problem with this?

I don't worry about whether google has a problem with my site.