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I am building out a new website for an existing online academic journal. The older site serves up its articles (~5k to ~12k words each) via PDF only and my plan is to offer up the content in html form (while keeping the PDF downloads as an alternative).
The majority of magazine, newspaper and academic websites that I’ve seen like to split longer articles up into smaller bites with page number navigation at the bottom of each page. This is considered best practice, I guess, and probably for good reason.
I would really like to keep my articles on a single web page, however, in part due to the fact that I am working with existing publications that must remain citable. In my experiments, I am applying subtle borders and backgrounds to demarcate the individual article “pages” and so far I think it actually looks pretty good. Much better than I expected, actually. I just don’t know if I am running the risk of losing my audience this way.
An alternative to consider might be the grouping of 1-3 “pages” at a time on a given web page, while continuing to demarcate “pages” using borders and backgrounds, and reducing the amount of text on a given web page. But I’m still not convinced something this is really absolutely necessary, especially given the (largely) academic audience we are going for.
I’m interested in polling and soliciting the opinions of other and more experienced designers on this matter. Thanks in advance!