Item — HN Reader

"A long web page means you have failed to organize your site properly."

I think this is outdated. Longer homepages—ones that scroll down and appropriately present the content with good flow, organization, and spacing—are just fine. The Docker homepage[1], for example, is not afraid of the scroll bar.

I only bring this up because I think the opposite idea of trying to cram everything above the fold or spread it out across 12 micro-pages creates even more problems.

[1] https://www.docker.com/

7 comments

This made me think of Wikipedia. Some of their topics have incredibly long pages. It's clearly very poor advice as a blanket statement. Wikipedia would be a much worse site if they made you navigate page-to-page for each section about a topic.

Hacker News too.

I totally agree. Long homepages is a good example of how much what is considered good web design has changed since 1994. I remember making lots of micro-pages, submenus and subsubmenus for even the smallest sites, to avoid scrolling on small 15" CRT screens in 1995. JavaScript was considered really bad practice until Gmail was launched in 2005 and jQuery in 2006. So there was no dropdown menus, unless you used applets. I remember overselling Java applets instead to clients in 1996 and 1997. Applets with listboxes and checkboxes looked different in all the different browsers. Embossed shiny buttons made in photoshop is hardly in use anymore.

In another 20 years time, what is considered good web design will probably be totally different anyway.

Maps is what changed the game on JS to me. It was magic what they did. And then Gmail came and leveled it up again.

I still remember a great Joel on Software article where Spolsky talks about "things that just aren't possible on the web" like red underlines for misspelled words. We get that now from the browser in text controls, but even if we didn't, it would be pretty trivial.

Progress!

You don't need JS or applets for dropdowns.

You did back then.

Javascript was very popular for drop-down menu ever since Netscape Navigator 2 and IE 3 (DHTML).

Java applets were a lot less common. Macromedia's Flash 5/MX took over that Java applet marketshare around 2000.

Yeah, GP said "dont need JS or applets", but you did indeed need JS.

It's not a clear-cut to me. The scrollable design has its own usability problems if you look closer at the Docker page: multiple access paths, content spread, and more often than not people just don't notice there's a scrollbar (with 16:9 they are so tiny that a distracted visitor may not notice it). You can tell that the designer of the Docker page had this problem because you see three times "What is docker?" on that page, two of them being actual links.

For a landing page, it's a bad thing.

For a content page, you should absolutely not split content, except on major logical boundaries (e.g., chapters or larger sections within a book).

A site I refer to with great frequency is the Project Gutenberg copy of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations. This packs over 1,000 pages of printed text on a single web page.

It's actually pretty usable, and it makes searching for text a lot easier than separate pages.

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3300/3300-h/3300-h.htm

I personally hate such design - what's the point of having a 24" monitor when the web page looks like it's optimized for mobile/tablet anyway?

Why would you say that?

That website is firmly optimised for large screens, certainly not phones. It’s not even a little bit responsive. And it still manages to have too long line-lengths (though I do like it’s hierarchy and use of white space).

The information density (text/meaningful graphics per square inch) is very low - most of the space is unused, the text is large etc. I assumed that, on smaller screens, the page would be laid out so that there's less wasted space...

But there's a related problem with docker.com: The site is so afraid that you might miss any of its very important links that it misses any comprehensible organization of its content (at least on the main page). Instead, it presents the content in various ways, often in parallel, leaving you without a (mental) map. Thus, you will probably miss some of the content advertised there ...

Longer home pages are not just fine. The current trend to have a huge scrollable page is generally bad design.