When One Page Is Enough

Building and organizing an attractive and effective web site doesn't always need to be a complex task. In some cases, you can effectively present a great deal of useful information on a single page, without a lot of flashy graphics. In fact, there are several advantages to a single-page site:

• All the information on the site downloads as quickly as possible.

• The whole site can be printed on paper with a single print command, even if it is several paper pages long.

• Visitors can easily save the site on their hard drive for future reference, especially if it uses a minimum of graphics.

• Links between different parts of the same page usually respond more quickly than links to other pages.

Figure 22.1 shows the first part of a web page that serves its intended audience better as a single lengthy page than it would as a multipage site. It contains about eight paper pages worth of text explaining how to participate in a popular email discussion list.

Figure 22.1. A good table of contents can make a lengthy page easy to navigate.

The page begins, as most introductory pages should, with a succinct explanation of what the page is about and who would want to read it. A detailed table of contents allows readers to skip directly to the reference material in which they are most interested. (Refer to Hour 6, "Creating Text Links," for a refresher on how to build a table of contents.)

As Figure 22.2 shows, each short section of the page is followed by a link back up to the table of contents, so navigating around the page feels much the same as navigating around a multipage site. Because the contents of the page are intended as a handy reference, readers will definitely prefer the convenience of being able to bookmark or save a single page instead of 8 or 10 separate pages.

Figure 22.2. Always provide a link to the table of contents after each section of a long web page.

Did you Know?

Having seen all the fancy graphics and layout tricks in the book, you may be tempted to forget that a good old-fashioned outline is often the clearest and most efficient way to organize a web site. Even if your site does require multiple pages, a list like the table of contents shown in Figure 22.1 may be the best way to guide people through a relatively small web siteor subsections of a larger one.