Keep your pages relatively short

One of the sins committed by many inexperienced webmasters is the creation of very long pages. I've seen this most often on sites created at universities, although it can happen anywhere.

It's very annoying to run into these amateur sites (although sometimes they look very professional). On one occasion I found a site with a 15 megabyte page! No graphics at all either - just one long, long, long page. I remember surfing to the site (it was a list of jokes) and I just waited and waited. I could see from my internet throughput meter that massive amounts of data was being received so I waited ... but it was ridiculous! I'm very glad that I have a 1.7mb connection - otherwise I would hit the top button long before this page was done loading.

Another place that I've seen this is when someone simply posts some large text files to the internet. They don't even bother to convert the file to HTML - just link to the text file directly. While this is a fast way to get something onto the web, it is a sign of a true internet amateur. 

Okay, here's the problems with this practice. 

• The majority of people on the internet use normal 28.8 or slower modem connections. If you have a page which requires over a minute to download on this kind of connection you've almost guaranteed that your visitors will go somewhere else.

• Search engine spiders do not like long documents. Many of them will stop after 100kb or so - it's anyone's guess if the spider actually looks at a page that is a megabyte in length.

• Many usability studies have proven over and over that it is very uncommon for visitors to scroll down the screen much (and often not at all). They will scroll if they read something of interest, but they will not scroll very far. Most people tend to prefer clicking on links to scrolling down the page.

• Navigation on a very long page becomes difficult, if not impossible. One of the major advantages to splitting up a long document into many smaller pages is the control you gain over navigation.

• Other web sites will find it difficult to link to specific content on your page. This is the web, and webmasters want to link to pages on a site which pertain to their own content. If you have one long page, you effectively discourage this kind of linking, which means you will get fewer links. No matter what you think about intrasite linking (linking to anything except the homepage), the majority of webmasters will do so. Your best course of action is to make it easy for them to link to any page on your site (not, of course, directly to graphics, sounds or multimedia - that is bandwidth stealing).

You have to remember when you are creating a web site that's it's a web site. You are not creating a book which goes from front to back - you are creating a web of links from page to page.

The really good webmasters learn how to take supreme advantage of this fact and create web sites that are a dream to navigate. Pages flow from one to the other, with links here and there where appropriate. A good webmaster would never (except under some special conditions) create a huge page of text or graphics - that's not the way the web works.

So what do you do? Take advantage of hyperlinks and split a large document up into as many smaller documents as necessary. Link them together as appropriate. Using this simple technique, you can create documents that are interesting and in which visitors are interested (which is what is important, after all).