Pagination rethinking
The navigation between pages at websites and applications is one of the simplest things that we almost never think of. Basically we have two choices of pagination — infinite scroll and standard pagination, like [prev] [1] [2] … [147] [next].
The infinite scroll pagination is a good choice for social networks where posts quantity is somewhere close to ∞infinity. It’s great and really don’t need any improvements if social network has option to filter the years and months of publications.
But the blogs most commonly use simple standard pagination.
What if current pagination is not right? Let’s just think about it. What is a blog? Basically, a blog is a book that we are writing. How we write pages on books? Right, we give every new page a new number in the ascending way, like 1 2 3 4… But why for blogs we do it in reverse way? Why our every new blog post is on the first page?
This thing is bothering me every day i work with my WordPress websites.
We can say simply “every blog platform is doing so so i think it’s the right way” Stop. Why? May be It’s just another common mistake. The world has many things done wrong like not caring about global warming, starting wars everywhere and consuming twice more sugar every day than we need to…
Issues
Anyway, let’s think about the issues of the standard pagination that we use every day.
First and main issue is if you know that yesterday the 17th page of your favorite blog there was a lot of great articles tomorrow probably they won’t be there. Where would they be after the author posted another 10 articles? How about a week later? Right on the 17th + N page. So in the current state of pagination pages even don’t need numbers, it can be just random letters or simply dots. It doesn’t matter, because what was on the 17th page on this week a week later can be on 25th or even 37th page. You simply won’t find the content you’re looking for on the 17th page anymore.
The second issue is with search services like Google. If some search engine crawled a content that you need a week ago and put the link on the page where the article was on that day instead of an article itself today you probably won’t find the content you’re looking for if you got there using a link from Google search engine.
What we should do?
Just reverse it. Let’s write a blog like writing a book, let’s the first article of your blog from 2005 will be on the first page. And current page you’ll post your next article could be the last page. Simple? Yes. Why no one ever thought of it? I really don’t know.
May be I’m really missing something, if i did please tell me the pros and cons of standard navigation vs. reversed one.
