Real quick one here. I know that some of my posts are, uh, a little on the long side. That isn’t likely to change any time soon, so what I’d like to ask you, dear readers, is how you feel about multi-page posts – i.e. you read down, then there’s a page selector to push to the next part of the post. I can’t imagine that normally I’d ever exceed 2 pages, but I can’t figure out if using this capability is a good or a bad thing.
How do you feel about it? Do you hate when blogs split posts over 2 or more pages? Or do you prefer breaking it up into manageable chunks?
I appreciate your opinions -thank you!
John.
Update 5/31: The votes are in, and I hear you loud and clear! Between here, Twitter and Facebook the unanimous opinion is to avoid pagination and, where appropriate, just split a long post into two separate posts if it helps. Thank you – your wish is my command!
No please. I’d rather scroll through a long read with decent paragraphs than 4 pages with reloading.
Thanks, Hans!
I agree. Scrolling is better.
Noted! Thank you.
Always prefer to scroll down through a long article than have the flow broken by having to load a new page. More long pages please!
Thank you!
Scrolling please. Mobile browsing will love you.
No to multiple pages. If it really is that long that it needs multiple pages maybe break it into separate articles. But I just get annoyed with multiple pages as I think they only exist to generate ad impressions.
Well in my case, I don’t have ads so you know that’s not my motivation! Opinion gratefully received – thank you.
Like Steve says, if you find it running long you should ask yourself if you have multiple articles on your hands. This happens all the time to me: I’m writing something and I realize that my 3 bullet points just became 3x 3000 words. So it’s time to split it up.
Just to add my voice to “scrolling is better”. The web is not a book, the only reason to have multiple pages to to facilitate linking to a particular page with specific information (for example review sites that break the review into sections).
Thanks for asking the question!
I like single page posts. When they get into multi-page, you have to start to wonder if you have too much information you are trying to share. Sometimes those posts are better as a series versus one long-winded post.