Most of the sites we design at IMA “scroll,” that is, accommodate any length of text on the page, which the user accesses by using the scroll bar at the right of the Internet browser. However, our own site, and the sites we designed for Getnick & Getnick and Maria Taglienti Photography, as well as the site we’re contemplating for the Balanchine 100 anniversary, all use a paging metaphor – text is confined to a single screen, and the user clicks a button on the page to move to the next page.
 
There are pros and cons to both approaches, of course. There is often a tendency to overload a scrolling page past the usability metric of “three screens of content,” simply because once the content disappears under the scroll bar, it no longer exists in the developer’s or the content producer’s mind. But it is not optimal design because research shows that users dislike long scrolling pages.
 
Length is also a detriment in the paging metaphor, as the reader needs to keep clicking a next button to continue to read content. In addition, a printer friendly version (which contains all of the content and therefore scrolls) is generally considered a requirement for pages that are candidates for printing. This is one reason, for instance, that IMA press releases appear in a printer-friendly version only, and why descriptions of Getnick & Getnick practice areas appear in both printer-friendly and paging versions.  Otherwise, the user would have to keep clicking and printing through a series of pages – which is not a solution that we would recommend.
 
So why use the paging metaphor at all? The elegance of having all the content on a single page is the major reason – there is a certain stylized feel to a constrained space that a scrolling page cannot fully approximate. Pages that are driven exclusively by Flash, such as Maria Taglienti’s site, or the majority of the IMA Web site, must, in fact, be contained within a specifically sized window.
 
One of the lessons we’ve learned at IMA, though, is to be careful to apply the paging metaphor only to pages that will not be changing often, particularly when changes have an “overflow” effect to later sections of the page. Having to re-situate the content continually makes maintenance more difficult than it needs to be. This is why sites such as the Balanchine 100, which has a limited shelf life and will have highly static content – and which by its subject matter lends itself to an elegant presentation – are much better candidates than sites such as the recently completed, content rich, continually changing IATSE-International site.