Tags for this article: advice, html, length, suggestions, tips, web design, webpage, website
There is lots of focus on the Web design sites on how wide and your webpage should be as width is very much important to a webpage. Have you ever thought on how long should your webpage be? Conventional wisdom tells that one shouldn’t make a page longer than a particular screen full of text as readers will hate to scroll down the page. The content below the screen full is called as fold and most of the webpage designers have a belief that the fold will not be visible for the readers.
The study done by UIE has found that most users will be ready to scroll over the pages without a single comment.
Scrolling is not the only thing that hides the information
One of the most common arguments that are found against writing long pages is that it more often causes the information on the page to be hidden that is below the field and readers will not be able to read or see that. When you put that information on any other page will altogether will hide the entire information. In other words we can tell that, if some 100 people visit the first page and later only 50 make it to the second page and only 25 visits the third page and so on. The viewing drop rate will be very much high from second page.
Normally when a page is long, for the reader there will be a visual cue in the form of a scroll bar on to the right side of the page. In order to make their pages to look too short, most of the designers will change the length of their page’s scroll bar. If it is done in this way, people will not see that and will be reading the entire page. When you create small pages and provide a link to the nect page where you can give more information without telling the user on how long is the page. If the information is put in only one page, the readers will show interest and will scan the entire page.
Some thing block the scrolling
If at all you have long pages and want your users to scroll through the entire page, you have to see that nothing blocks the scroll bar. These are some of the elements on your webpage that implies that the page is over. The elements are
Lines of text links
Horizontal lines
Social media links or navigation icons
Short or wide graphics
Finally how long should be your webpage?
Your page length will ultimately depend on your audience. Like adults, children will not be having long attention spans and here if a topic is good to read, then it will be of no matter how long is your page.
So no article should or must exceed two printed pages
If your content is merited, you can put it one page and make your reader read the page and make them to go to nect page.