Re: Long vs. Short Web pages

["Susan Self @ignite" <susan -at- ALSYS -dot- COM>]

As a reader of other company's web pages, nothing is more annoying
to me than finding a great deal of marketing generalities about a
product and no substantial information to let me know if the
product is suitable for my purposes or not.

As a writer of web pages, I have tried to provide enough detailed
information about each product that the reader can appreciate what
it is and make an initial evaluation of its usefulness.
I have used the method of having main topic links at the beginning
of the document so the reader has a sense of the scope of the document
and can easily jump to a topic of greatest interest.

I feel that these online documents have enough information to make them
worth printing out. I myself routinely print out web documents with
highly useful information. I dislike pages with many unnecessary
graphics--images that look pretty but convey little information--
because they take an extremely long time to print out and hold up
the printer queue. Printing out informative documents locally
rather than sending out glossy brochures with the same information
eliminates the snail-mail overhead of paper, postage, and transportation
and enables the reader to get the information immediately.

Web pages do not eliminate the need for marketing mailings
and glossy brochures, but they enable a company to communicate to
a wider audience in a more immediate and different way. To make
a web page just a teaser to get people to call or write in for
a brochure seems to diminish the effectiveness of the web as
a means of providing information.

Susan Self
susan -at- thomsoft -dot- com