• Register
• Log in

SEO Theory - SEO Theory and Analysis Blog

Algorithm analysis, Web community relationship analysis, SEO practices and techniques, industry news, etc.

• Home
• About SEO Theory
• SEO Glossary

Micropages - State of the art content structures

Posted by Michael Martinez on December 12, 2007 in Content Theory

The odds are pretty good that if you have been surfing the Web for at least a year you have seen a micropage and not recognized it for what it is. If you have been surfing the Web for at least five years the odds are pretty good that you HAVE seen a micropage and you know what it is but you probably don’t call it a “micropage”. That’s my name for it, and maybe a few other people’s name for it.

There is actually a site called micropage.org that purportedly links to example micropage sites. In fact, they don’t apear to be micropage sites to me at all, but micropage.org is a micropage site.

You’ll see micropages in rare places because Web designers tend to spoil the concept. A micropage format may be suitable for a phone number search result, a social media site profile, or a data entry form like a login screen. The micropage can be sparsely populated or intensively populated.

A really cool micropage might use CSS or Javascript to load a gadget after the visitor clicks a launch button. The chief difference between a micropage and a small HTML page lies in the complexity of the page structure or design. If you’re throwing advertisements and/or navigational menus on a small content page it’s not a micropage.

Here is a crude example of a micropage which shows you that it is W3C-compliant (I used a table just to annoy people though). However, even with my ugly table-based design you can use a browser emulator to confirm that it looks okay. You can also use a spider emulator to ensure that your text linearizes.

Micropages should start to sound familiar to those of you who have been surfing the mobile Web but in fact they’ve been around for years and you can occasionally main traditional Web sites that employ them for a variety of reasons.

Micropage content can be integrated with your traditional Web content through a simple text link embedded in the upper left-hand corner of your pages (independently of your traditional Web navigation or as part of your traditional Web navigation).

Micropages obviously don’t conform to Web 2.0 expectations and standards. You can certainly dress up a micropage with some style sheets to make it look more robust to someone who isn’t surfing on a mobile phone but you can use micropages to improve accessibility, define concepts, and structure a robust on-site help system that isn’t cluttered with bandwidth-hogging mastheads, advertisements, etc.

I would limit the availability of micropages to visitors. For example, I would not permit visitors to create them. Although some sites have used micropages as user profiles you don’t want to provide gratuitous content to strangers. Nor do you want to orphan your micropages.

In fact, navigation should be integral to your micropage structure. You need to offer your visitors a way off the page. You also need to limit the number of options people have to choose from.

Micropages can be used to provide quick, lean information.

Micropages should be used to offer a small selection of choices.

Micropages should be considered transactional pages. Send your visitors to micropages to conduct some sort of transaction: answer their question, streamline their navigation through your site, ask them a question (surveys, tests, and polls have used micropages for years), or show them your credentials.

As the mobile Web becomes more popular and important we’ll have to find ways to bridge the barriers between our mobile-ugly graphics-laden content and potential visitors’ small screens. Offer people a quick means of making purchases, enterting reservations.

People who want lean content don’t want flashy interfaces, but they do need to get from one page to the next and you have to map out your micropages in the shortest number of steps possible.

People who want lean content are transaction-oriented. They aren’t looking for long-winded, Michael Martinez-class discourses on concepts. They want the quick, brief definitions; the simple examples; the thin illustrations; the short list of most relevant facts.

You need to think about how to integrate your micropage content into your site presentation scheme because the micropages are themselves the search tools people use to find more information, more actions. On a small screen, particularly in a moving vehicle where you don’t know where you’ll lose your connection next, every action and page change carries an immense opportunity cost.

You need to justify the cost of using your resources for the mobile user.

But if you’re integrating micropages into your regular Web content you need to ensure that you offer your visitors a clear direction back to the typical content they reach out from. That is, you may be able to leverage micropages to serve the needs of multiple users.

Micropages are quick and easy to build, so be careful you don’t bloat your site with too many micropages. We have not yet had a real chance to evaluate the impact that micropages will have on the World Wide Web. They have, until now, been relatively scarce. I think that in a relatvely short amount of time there will be a growing abundance of micropage content that we’ll have to integrate into the regular Web.