Back in 2005, I wasn’t really doing much online. I had a blog that hardly anyone was reading, a CMS that hardly anyone was using, and some music that hardly anyone was hearing.
Not much has changed since then, except for getting 5 years older, and perhaps too many years more cynical than my chronological age.
Luckily, what I was doing in 2005 is not the focus of this post.
Back then, I noticed a lot of “new and improved” sites popping up. Rounded corners, drop shadows, big fonts, white backgrounds and calming blue gradients were in.
Web 2.0 had entered the public consciousness.
Enter Web 2.0
Or rather, a marketing guy coined the phrase, and suddenly everything else gained a similar “2.0″ suffix. Ironically, in some corners of the web*, there were claims that Web 2.0 eschewed the use of version numbers. Clearly someone still thought the web itself needed a version number…
Flickr revolutionised photo sharing, and countless sites tried to mimic its vowel-dropping antics. Hi, Tumblr. (Yeah, I could only think of one example. You can help me by naming some more.)
Mainly on the plain
Looking at Flickr’s interface even now, it may be plain, but at least the surrounding navigation doesn’t overpower the focal point of every page: the photography. The content shouldn’t be overshadowed by the site itself.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t all good. Somewhere along the line, we lost one of the most vital elements of site navigation: page numbers. Now, I think it’s fair to say not every site has abandoned the concept of pagination, but some key sites lack it: WordPress, Facebook, and Twitter.
WordPress allows you to reclaim your missing page number links with a plugin or perhaps a theme adjustment – the two are so closely intertwined, it’s hard to know which one to talk about. Or is it a widget?
Performance or bad design?
Can we really say that performance is a reason for this? Given an archive of 1000 posts on a long running blog, wouldn’t you use less processing power if you counted the total number of pages, and gave Mr New Reader a link right to the last page – than if you relied on him clicking next, next, next? Or previous, previous, previous… as this isn’t always consistent either.
Can’t you just search the blog? Well maybe, but the beauty of a blog is in the way it builds up over time – like a long running TV series. Skilled blog writers link their posts together – not just with a clickable link, but with themes, in-jokes, characters, follow-up posts, reader interaction and a whole host of other stuff I should probably stop telling you to do, and try doing myself.
Loyal readers
If there’s a blog that particularly interests you, I can see why you might want to jump to the very beginning and read it the whole way through. Sure, a casual reader might not be so inclined to do such a thing, but loyal readers are worth their weight in gold. Even if they’re fanboy/fangirl crazy. Bless ‘em.
Who did this?
So, come on. Own up. Who told us to stop using page numbers? Since when did it become fun to endlessly click “next” to read more content than you can see on a single page?
Even if it displays said content without reloading the page, it’s still a shit user experience.
* I’m sure those corners were rounded, too.
About Ben
There’s another site that I use occasionally that is in dire need of a logical way to click on page numbers is Gather. I absolutely hate having to click through each number without being able to click to the end. This is a site that’s been in operation for years and yet they haven’t made it any more user friendly. Other sites like FindAGrave at least you can click in groups of 20 or so. Sorry, I kind of got off topic in a way.