Simple Question ... or is it?

[Dinghus]

When you come across pagination would you rather have the ability to jump to any page or just to the next page (forward and back)?

I'm working on a shopping site and the question is if there are like 30 pages, do I put in a link for previous page and next page only or put in like links for a whole bunch of pages (1 2 3 .... last )

If you are at all curious about the site you can see it at DonOmall - Your one stop shopping site

Functionality can be commented on but there is no design work done on it yet. Even the logo is just a slap up job from an online free logo generator.

[ristenk1]

I always like to have the option to jump to differnt pages..2,3,4 in between the first and last pages so that if I'm browsing and see something I like I can remember what page it was on and get back to it faster rather than having to keep hitting the back button.

[cw1865]

Originally Posted by Dinghus

When you come across pagination would you rather have the ability to jump to any page or just to the next page (forward and back)?

Between the two I'd rather have the ability to jump to a specific page.

Originally Posted by Dinghus

I'm working on a shopping site and the question is if there are like 30 pages, do I put in a link for previous page and next page only or put in like links for a whole bunch of pages (1 2 3 .... last )

If you are at all curious about the site you can see it at DonOmall - Your one stop shopping site

Functionality can be commented on but there is no design work done on it yet. Even the logo is just a slap up job from an online free logo generator.

That being said, overall consider your categorization. I used to have categories with large numbers of products. Only a certain number of products were permitted on each page and the category would paginate itself like you are discussing.

Overall, I found that page2......page 30 may as well have been on the moon. Google didn't spider that deep, the products weren't in the cache and I may as well have been selling the stuff on the moon.

I made a concerted effort to make the website more shallow. Any category has ONE PAGE.

Example:

Category 'widgets' (300 products, 10 per page)
you wind up with a website where the products on page 2....30 are 4 deep from the surface, assuming page 2....30 are linked from the first page of the category.

Example 2:
Category: Red Widgets (10 products, 10 per page)
Category2: Blue Widgets (same)
Category 3: White widgets (same)
etc.

Now each product is only three deep.

Even if you broke 300 products into 6 categories and had 50 products on a page (assuming this did not significantly affect your load time), you're still probably better off because even though the products that the user has to scroll to are unlikely to be scrolled to by a user, the products are still only three deep and get crawled and cached by google, so between counting on google for a long-tailed search or relying on a user for an in-depth search of your site, I chose long-tail search.

I've found that my users either have found what they're looking for in 4 clicks or they're basically gone.

[DaveSawers]

I hate those websites where they put 10 products on a page and there are 20 pages in the category. if you want to lay it out like that then for sure have a direct link to each of the pages, but also add an option to show all the products on one page.

[morestar]

I have to agree with everyone's sentiments - make links to each page...in the long run it makes the user experience much better. Being able to jump from page to page becomes really convenient when it comes to looking over a product again.

[Dinghus]

Okay. Sounds like a plan.
Of course I guess none of you actually looked at the site. It is not a bunch of products that I am pushing. Basically a person enters a search term like "Nintendo DS" and my site goes to over 1000 sites looking for matches. Amazon, EBay, BestBuy etc etc plus smaller ones. So items on page 5 during a search may be on page 6 the next time. Depends on what is out there.
Currently I'm trying to make it return the most relevant in one place and the long list in another with the ability to narrow the search. Some come up with over a million results, so I can't put them all on one page.