Pagination in Articles is Evil

Posted on April 23, 2007 (History)
Tags: design, development, pagination, web

Mike Davidson has a nice article on his blog about the evil of pagination for articles. As he said, it's a cheap way of getting more ad-clicks per article that doesn't really benefit the actual user, although quite a few content providers will probably state, that they only did it to make reading easier for the user.

For me personally, pagination in articles is one of the most annoying things I can think of. First of all, it makes printing nearly impossible if the content provider doesn't also provide some special printing functionality (which could be done by simply adding a print stylesheet without the pagination). IGN comes to mind here, were they have pagination and no printing system.

Besides IGN another example for ugly pagination is w3schools.com. Every single page in their paginations has only a quite limited amount of content and the navigation buttons nearly disappear in the amount of not clearly distinguishable advertising...

At least there are some site-specific solutions for people who hate paginations as much as I do, such as a Greasemonkey script for IGN which is available on userscripts.org.

So to all webdevs: Could you please stop paginating articles? Thanks.