Lorelle rants against multiple page posts. I completely agree with her a better alternative might be to split the big article in multiple posts instead of multiple pages. Why? Because then a single posts becomes a single unit to read and provides the entire context. In multiple pages it is quite possible that the page ends abruptly and expects one more click from the reader to complete the context, especially if the next page contains only 2 or 3 lines.
Many times, I’ve come to the “continues on next page†link and was determined to keep reading. I click the next page link and it features two sentences. Why bother forcing me to waste bandwidth to load a new page for only two sentences? Ridiculous time waster.
Pagination has been a topic of discussion a lot of times. Even in the search results using pagination numbers are not very useful, they do not indicate any quality of the results. Of course, pagination is here so that the data retrieval can be controlled. But there can be better alternatives.
With regards to a blog post, or I would extend this to even newspaper and magazine articles, it is better from a reader’s perspective to keep a post on a single page. It is convenient, usable, consistent across various syndication formats and allows you to create a series of articles with continuous flow. Well said Lorelle.
June 12th, 2007 at 10:18 am
I’m so thrilled someone agrees with me. This is such a pain. I’d love to see it gone from the web as I still haven’t come up with a single reason why anyone should break posts up into pages. Have you?
June 13th, 2007 at 7:59 am
I used to earlier think if the pagination of posts edged on the usability v/s performance issue, since downloading a big post can take time. But the better solution to this is to split into multiple posts and build a series, like you had said. No case for paged posts.