Move Vital but Tangential or Supplemental Material - Page 5

New Riders Publishing

January 25, 2002

If most people know it, move it

To let our readers know that you, too, belong to their community, mention ideas they are familiar with. But even more convincing proof that you are a member of the community is what you leave out. You understand what can be taken for granted as part of the shared knowledge of the community, so you omit it.

Unfortunately, on the Web, you cannot always tell how knowledgeable a visitor may be. So you take your best guess at the audience, and, instead of omitting the basics, or the extras, you put them elsewhere on the site and link to them. That way, a beginner can find out more, an eager learner can explore at will, but the impatient or experienced visitors do not have to stumble over the material.

One who uses many periods is a philosopher; many interrogations, a student; many exclamations, a fanatic.
— J. L. Basford

If your product is complex enough that you cannot provide all the information someone needs in one presentation (and most of ours are that complex), make it easy for them to get more information.
(Rick Levine, Sun Guide to Web Style).

Move the baby talk, and the esoterica

When looking for passages to pull out of your page and move to secondary pages, grab:

Basic background
Laborious history
Abstract theoretical discussions
Information of interest only to a small fraction of the audience
Advanced arguments for the benefit of the cognoscenti
Important topics that do not belong here

But don't just carve up a single long article into a bunch of short takes, just because you can. Downloading a bunch of little segments slows up the process of reading, and makes printing a headache.

Let's go to the sidebar

In the O.J. Simpson trial, we learned that when the prosecutor and defense lawyers huddled with the judge, they were "having a sidebar."

Magazines run extra information in boxes next to the main article, and those boxes are also called sidebars.

Web designers have adopted the sidebar as the place for a quick digest of a long story and links to supplementary information. Usually, the Web page sidebar shows up on the far right, near the top of the story, just below some annoying ad.

Both the summary and the links let users know what the whole story centers on, so they help people decide whether or not to bother reading on. In some cases, people like the links more than the story, and jump right to the secondary pages.

Remove the irrelevant

If users bump into irrelevant info, it blinds them to the info they want. Unnecessary info actually keeps them from finding what they are looking for.

Of course, you have to be psychic to know what information your visitors will consider most relevant. But if you can figure that out and move the rest elsewhere, visitors will voluntarily sharpen their focus on your ideas, understand them better, and remember more. When readers find content to be relevant, they give it more attention. So figure out what most visitors will find intriguing and relevant to their own interests, and then put any other info into a sidebar or links.