RE: Best practice for technical documentation page length on a website?

["Gordon McLean" <Gordon -dot- McLean -at- GrahamTechnology -dot- com>]

Spooky, we just had this very conversation today. 

My understanding is that the "users don't like to scroll" thinking is now
outdated. It should be (have been) stated as "users don't like to scroll too
much".

One solution would be to use inter-page links, and present a short list of
links at the top of the long page, allowing users to click to jump to the
specific location in a long page.

In your example though, I'd question the reasoning as to why you have six
separate pages in the first place, there might be a very good reason for
that. 

HTH

Gordon


-----Original Message-----
Subject: Best practice for technical documentation page length on a website?


Within the original CHM files, the tendency was to have a fairly 'deep'
table of contents and often lots of relatively short pages within each
section. This same structure was transferred to the website.

Understandably, some people are complaining that it takes too long to drill
down and find information, and I agree that many of the sections could be
combined into a single page (many pages are no more than a paragraph long).
I'm comfortable with this, but in the back of my mind I have the words of a
web developer ringing in my ears from years ago - "web users don't like
scrolling, pages should be short and snappy".

Now, this was some time ago, and I suspect that attitudes have changed,
particularly with the advent of wikis, etc. I also feel that there is a
significant difference between writing "short, snappy" pages for a standard
website, and writing pages that contain technical documentation.

I will obviously seek the views of people who use the documentation before I
make major changes, but I'm just wondering if anyone is aware of a 'best
practice' for this. What would you do if you had six separate pages of
technical documentation that could (logically) be combined into one, long
web page that would require multiple scrolls to read?


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