How much content should go on each site page? Like Goldilocks and the three bears, the answer is not too much, and not too little: just the right amount of content.
It's in the interest of the site publisher to keep pages short, because the same amount of content spread over shorter pages makes for more pages. And more pages on a site means more places for advertising, which in theory might mean more revenue.
"In addition, more pages may mean more page views, implying better metrics to advertisers who don't look too carefully."
However, if you break an article up into many short pages that a user has to click through, users will find it irritating and vote with their time by frequenting the site less often.
"For an example of a site that has chosen to maximize pages it can place ads on at the cost of potentially alienating readers by dividing articles up into many small pages that must be clicked through, see TheStreet.com , http://www.thestreet.com."
The happy medium is to be natural about page length. The natural length for a content page is the content that will reasonably fit into a maximized browser window without having to scroll.
"Obviously, this is a rough, rather than precise, guideline since different browsers on different systems will show different size pages."
Don't gratuitously break an article into multiple pages unless the article really is longer than a few browser-sized pages. Also, don't break an article (even if it is long) unless there are natural breaks in the content. Anytime there is a new Level 1 header in an article, it's a good sign that you could break to a new content page without the break feeling forced.
A related issue is to be careful about the width of your content pages. People will be looking at your web pages using a variety of hardware, operating systems, and browsers the most important variable being the monitor size. You don't want your readers to have to scroll to the right because part of a content web page is off the screen. This is very bad form and may also obscure content advertising if it is positioned along the right border of the page.
The answer is to design pages for lowest-common-denominator displays. In practice, content pages should be no wider than 800 pixels. Pages 800 pixels wide (or less) should display without scrolling on most (although not all) computers; some displays are still only 640 pixels wide. (For more on this issue, See "Positioning Ads," later in this chapter.)
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