Ben Barden

Tech Product Manager

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information architecture

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Why large websites should avoid full pagination

One of my long-standing navigation requirements for any website is pagination. It should be possible to see how many pages of content a site has, and it should be possible to jump to any page.

However, I’ve found this doesn’t really work on large news sites. When was the last time you saw a news site with pagination going back thousands of pages?

How news sites work

When readers go to a news site, they will usually be looking for the latest news. This can be found on the homepage, or you can drill down by going to a section page (Sport, Tech, Entertainment etc).

For a small site, or a section with only a few pages of content, it can be useful to click through each page to browse the history of the site. But once a site has published vast quantities of content, pagination becomes a lot less useful.

Who reads old news?

How useful is it to browse through old news, through thousands of pages? If you wanted to find an old story, there are a couple of ways to find it much more quickly:

  1. Search – no need to think about where the content is – just find it with a quick search;
  2. Archives – know when the story was published? Date-based archives can be a lot faster than scrolling through page after page;
  3. Related links – not really the best way to find a specific story, but if you’re on a story and you want to read other stories on similar topics, related links can be quite handy.

Crawlers and performance

There’s also the issue of crawlers. If search bots can crawl thousands of pages in your News category, they will try to. Wouldn’t it be better to limit your pagination to a small number of pages (10-20 at most) – or lose it altogether – so crawlers can index your stories first, and stop crawling your section pages?

We also noticed some crawl issues occurring due to crawlers simultaneously hitting multiple page numbers in the section archives. It didn’t make sense to keep thousands of old section pages active.

As long as your stories are in sitemaps, you don’t need to maintain an endless list of paginated section pages.

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10 quick tips for building an outstanding blog

I’ve been blogging on and off for nearly 8 years. Over the years I’ve picked up a few tips and tricks that are essential if you want to build a blog that’s outstanding in its field. Here’s my list:

  1. Be yourself. Why be anyone else? Putting yourself into your writing allows your posts to ooze personality. It also helps you to stand out. There’s nobody quite like you.
  2. Find a topic you enjoy. Why waste time on something you heard can be a good blog topic if it bores you to tears? Choose a topic you want to write about.
  3. Choose your target audience. Who are you writing for? Once you know that, it’s a lot easier to target your posts to that group of people. Get to know your audience.
  4. Find your unique angle. It’s all very well to find a great topic, but what’s different about your blog? What do you have to offer that others do not?
  5. Forge your own path. Don’t copy what others are doing. Experiment – find what works for you (and what doesn’t). Then do a lot of it.
  6. Cut the fluff. Do you take forever to make your point? Don’t do that. Get on with it!
  7. Aim for a clean layout. Don’t stuff your sidebar or footer with every widget imaginable. Keep your layout clean and only include “stuff” if it adds value. Along with keeping things tidy, it’ll help to keep your blog loading quickly.
  8. Don’t promote immediately. Get the basics figured out – and get some posts online – before you promote your blog. I like to have half a dozen posts online first.
  9. Keep things fresh. From time to time you’ll want to shake things up a bit. Whether it’s a series of posts, a guest post or a new design, changing things up can help to avoid blogger burnout. You should also take breaks from time to time.
  10. Interlink your content. Don’t leave your old posts wallowing in the archives. Tag your old posts – on WordPress.com or Tumblr this can breathe new life into old posts. Link to old posts from newer posts. And set up topic landing pages to help new readers find your best posts on a given topic.

Follow these tips and you should be well on your way to building an outstanding blog.