Which do you prefer when reading online articles?

Please reply to the poll. If you like, also provide your thoughts below.

Update: I have strong opinions about this. I believe if the information is easy to present on one page, it is best to present it on one page for the reader.

These are good examples of when pagination is helpful to the user:

http://developer.yahoo.com/ypatterns/navigation/pagination/item.html
http://developer.yahoo.com/ypatterns/navigation/pagination/search.html

This article specifically speaks strongly to my position on maintaining a single page presentation of articles on Overclockers.com, while using good structure (headings, bulletted lists, tables) to help the reader skim and find information quickly/easily:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/pagination-best-practices-for-seo-user-experience

I do feel our categories could be paginated better, to include first, last, as well an indication of where you are in the total layout of pages... But the articles themselves make sense to present on one page.

Paginating the article makes for faster load times when you have a lot of graphical content plus I find it easier to locate the stuff I'm interested i.e. game bench marks or power consumption etc...

Paged articles. With how skinee the space is setup here, some of the articles are webwheel nightmares (though how bad is webwheeling really?? )

As far as how those are setup, I would like to see either a dropdown so you can select the page, or have them linked at the bottom of each page. I do not like the prev/next options only as that forces one to go through all pages which is sometimes a bear, especially in how to/guide type articles when you just want to go to one specfic page to start.

Single page for me. I prefer 'web-wheeling' much more than multiple clicks and loads (and reloading ads for each page).

It is also easier to SEARCH the entire article at once rather than to search each page for what you are looking for.

You can avoid 'web-wheeling' altogether if you middle click the wheel. That puts you in smooth scroll mode where you can adjust the scroll speed by small mouse movements.

SINGLE PAGE or a link to a single page. I HATE having to click next 47 times to read an article.

I tend to like articles being spread across a few pages so that i can just click on the page in the index, and go to it. It also helps with load times if there's a lot of pictures/graphs, ect in the article.

How about paginated articles that have the "show it all on one page"
or a big one page article that still has the option to get to a specific section of the article via links at the top, like a table of contents?

This is the intarwebs, it's all high tech and stuff!!! Isn't there a way of getting the best of both?

There are ways of getting the best of both, but much of that relies on the underlying technology also - if wordpress doesn't support something directly, we either need to find a plugin to make it do what we want, or spend a lot of manual effort hand coding things for each article.

After it's already written, the amount of time spent on each article is measured in hours not minutes. Proofreading, grammar, images, layout - ensuring those are all at a quality level fit for the frontpage takes time, feedback, and input from multiple people.

With all volunteers, fitting these things into our schedules is a challenge and we spread the workload to make it possible. But, effectively these things act as constraints upon what is possible, and what isn't... Manually hand coding an HTML table of contents for each article and ensuring it's structured in a way that accomodates that table of contents likely isn't realistic.

If you only have 4-5 pages then I think it's great to have this feature but any more than that and it just gets frustrating

Just my opinion here.

Adragontattoo said:

SINGLE PAGE or a link to a single page. I HATE having to click next 47 times to read an article.

Click to expand...

Same here.


On the other hand, as a writer, I sometimes feel like multiple pages would allow for smoother transitions in my articles.

I'm not exactly for it one way or the other as good structuring goes a long way, but it also makes sense to use at least three pages for the introduction, body, and conclusion, especially if the article/review is extremely long. I often get annoyed when going back to long single page reviews and having to scroll through the introduction (introductory paragraph, test setup, features, etc) to find the results I want. I voted for pagination.

mbigna said:

Single page for me. I prefer 'web-wheeling' much more than multiple clicks and loads (and reloading ads for each page).

It is also easier to SEARCH the entire article at once rather than to search each page for what you are looking for.

You can avoid 'web-wheeling' altogether if you middle click the wheel. That puts you in smooth scroll mode where you can adjust the scroll speed by small mouse movements.

Click to expand...

Adragontattoo said:

SINGLE PAGE or a link to a single page. I HATE having to click next 47 times to read an article.

Click to expand...

+1 to what they said. Although, an option to view either way would be great, but only if it's easily implemented and doesn't take away from the work flow of the News Team.

I vote for one page. Here in the forums I set my posts per page at 100. At Newegg or anywhere I visit a lot I set the viewing page as long as possible. I really don't like having to flip through pages at all.

If we consistently have very long, similar articles, like product reviews with lots of testing and graphics, I would set up some kind of standard layout with multiple pages and a drop-down to access those pages. Many sites use this arrangement and it is very handy for referencing a review - but that should be the exception more than the rule ...

On my desktop I love one page solutions but when I am on my Ipod I like the Different pages

Adragontattoo said:

SINGLE PAGE or a link to a single page. I HATE having to click next 47 times to read an article.

Click to expand...

Same here, drives me nuts.

Adragontattoo said:

SINGLE PAGE or a link to a single page. I HATE having to click next 47 times to read an article.

Click to expand...

+1 But I'd like to see our pages have auto-width adjustment to take advantage of whatever resolution you have.

I'd also like to point out that with ALL comments being listed on the article page...some articles are still growing, and it's getting out of hand:
http://www.overclockers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=640475

Pagination on comments will likely occur at some point, options for handling that have already had preliminary discussions. Something we'll look closer at down the road as time and availability permits.

Fortunately we have inet to do things like that, because my web programming isn't that good - on the flipside tho, they have a lot of communities which require development work also.

With time however, it's something we may address after further discussion and decision making. In the meantime, its working alright and many other well established blogs either don't have comment systems at all, or handle comments in the same way... www.readwriteweb.com has some long comments on articles, but don't do anything to handle their comments as far as I can tell regarding pagination etc.

MIAHALLEN said:

+1 But I'd like to see our pages have auto-width adjustment to take advantage of whatever resolution you have.

Click to expand...

Slightly off topic, but I agree with Miah on this one. This is the one thing I would change if I was able to. My wide screen monitors do nothing but show blank space on the front page items. The forums are great however. It seems weird that the forums support this and the front page does not. I'm not a fan one way or the other of pagination or single page, but having to wheel when there is plenty of available space is annoying.

King107s said:

Paginating the article makes for faster load times when you have a lot of graphical content plus I find it easier to locate the stuff I'm interested i.e. game bench marks or power consumption etc...

Click to expand...

Couldn't have said it better myself.

For those of us outside of the reach of broadband, this is a huge issue.

Not saying this is the best, but here's some explanation to share some perspective on certain things mentioned...

sephkeene said:

For those of us outside of the reach of broadband, this is a huge issue.

Click to expand...

Unfortunately the analytics show non-broadband visitors are <10% of traffic. This was taken into consideration during the design phase, and the decision was made that it's best to cater to the largest crowd rather than the minority. 56K warnings on forum threads aren't too common these days, because really, almost no one is still on dial up.

Khemikal said:

Slightly off topic, but I agree with Miah on this one. This is the one thing I would change if I was able to. My wide screen monitors do nothing but show blank space on the front page items. The forums are great however. It seems weird that the forums support this and the front page does not. I'm not a fan one way or the other of pagination or single page, but having to wheel when there is plenty of available space is annoying.

Click to expand...

This was also something considered in the design phase. Our site uses a larger than standard layout compared to other popular sites - the homepage reaches edge to edge on a monitor width of 1280 pixels. Compared to Anandtech, this is bigger than what you will find there. People with smaller monitors are out of luck, but the stats also show there aren't many of them so we catered to the larger audience again.

I don't know any tech blogs which have variable sized width for their articles, and it wouldn't be difficult with our system for authors to format things in a way which works for variable width columns. Authors already have a hard enough time getting images to insert and display correctly, but that's the nature of community content - lots of new people writing and not very familiar with the tools.