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Author: Richard Lowe
One of the sins committed by many inexperienced webmasters is the creation
of very long pages. I've seen this most often on sites created at
universities, although it can happen anywhere.
It's very annoying to run into these amateur sites (although sometimes they
look very professional)
page! No graphics at all either - just one long, long, long page. I remember
surfing to the site (it was a list of jokes) and I just waited and waited. I
could see from my internet throughput meter that massive amounts of data was
being received so I waited ... but it was ridiculous! I'm very glad that I
have a 1.7mb connection - otherwise I would hit the top button long before
this page was done loading.
Another place that I've seen this is when someone simply posts some large
text files to the internet. They don't even bother to convert the file to
HTML - just link to the text file directly. While this is a fast way to get
something onto the web, it is a sign of a true internet amateur.
Okay, here's the problems with this practice.
- The majority of people on the internet use normal 28.8 or slower modem
connections. If you have a page which requires over a minute to download on
this kind of connection you've almost guaranteed that your visitors will go
somewhere else.
- Search engine spiders do not like long documents. Many of them will stop
after 100kb or so - it's anyone's guess if the spider actually looks at a
page that is a megabyte in length.
- Many usability studies have proven over and over that it is very uncommon
for visitors ( Next Page )
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