Awhile back, Mike Davidson wrote about pagination and page-view juicing. He made several points I highly agree with, the largest in regard to reasonable screen real-estate online and how we (as visitors) are less concerned with scrolling than having to load multiple pages (bandwidth, time, etc).
While many sites (I’m sure) split long articles into multiple pages for page-view juicing, it’s a highly obtrusive practice that I think should be sent to the bin.
Thankfully, Wired.com seems to have found a nice middle-ground. While they still split their articles into multiple pages (see screenshot below), they also include a ‘Full page’ link that reloads the current article into one long document.
For me, this is a great way to please both the advertising sales department and your site visitors - you still get at least one more reload of the page (perhaps with differently sized advertising?*), and visitors get to read the entire article in one take.
*Sadly, Wired.com did not change the advertising beyond what appears to be an ad-rotation schedule. With a format change, I’ve always stated that there’s great opportunity to change the advertisements - further with changes if the article is printed. What value does a ‘click here to hear the audio on this Flash animated ad’ do for me when I’ve printed an article in black and white? For the love of pete, people, please create an advertising vehicle that will create valuable printed advertising, or delete the worthless online-only ads from my laser prints!
I will say this for Wired.com: When printing the article in question, the ‘print-view’ presented did show a banner ad (again, worthless if printed), but the actual printed copy was stripped of advertising, comments, and header/footers. Good job there! Even so, why are sites still ignoring the tips for printing from Alistapart.com (and another)? Of course, the holy-grail for me (beyond better, relevant advertising) is the print-formatted links (either using footnotes or inline).
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