Site Design

Chunking information

Most information on the World Wide Web consists of short reference documents that are read non-sequentially. This is particularly true of educational ... web sites used to distribute information that might have been printed on paper a few years ago. Writers of technical documents discovered long before the Web was invented that users appreciate short "chunks" of information that can be scanned and located quickly. Short, uniformly-organized chunks of information particularly lend them to Web presentation, because:

Few Web users spend time reading long passages of text on-screen. Most users will save long documents to disk, or print them, rather than read extensive material online.
Discrete chunks of information lend themselves to Web links. The user of a link usually expects to find a specific unit of related information, not a whole book's worth of information to filter through. But don't subdivide your information too much, or you will frustrate your readers. One to three (printed) pages of information seems about right for a discrete chunk of information on the Web. A link that produces only a small paragraph of information would be silly in most situations.
A uniform format for organizing and presenting your information allows users to apply their past experience with your site to future searches and explorations, and allows users to predict how an unfamiliar section of your Web site will be organized.
Concise chunks of information are better suited to the computer screen, which provides a only limited view of long documents. Very long Web pages tend to be disorienting, because they require the user to scroll long distances, and to remember the organization of things that have scrolled off-screen.

There will be times when it makes sense to provide long documents in single Web pages, as integrated units of information. Although chunks of information in online documents should usually be kept short, it makes little sense to arbitrarily divide up a long document. This is particularly true when you want users to be able to print or save the document in one step.

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The most basic layout decision you will make about your home page concerns how heavily you will use graphics on the page. While strong graphics can be effective at grabbing a browser's attention, large graphic menus impose long loading times for pages, especially for users linking to the Internet via modems or slower network connections.

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