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I'm working on a local cinema's movies website, and I've been trying to reduce the number of pages in favour of showing more types of content on them. Currently, I have a Home page (with a carousel / slider and links to other pages), a Movies page (with content like 'current movies', 'trending movies' and 'top movies') and a Cinemas page, where users can find details of their local branch.

What I'm asking is this: am I wise to be trying to reduce the number of pages in favour of adding more types of content to the pages I keep?

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    What are you asking here, is it about whether the home button is needed on the navigation? That has been asked several times here, for example: ux.stackexchange.com/questions/17472/… if this isn't your question can you reword it because it isn't very clear what you're asking.
    – JonW
    Commented Mar 15, 2012 at 18:29
  • no no I update my question
    – Abudayah
    Commented Mar 15, 2012 at 19:15
  • Hi, Abudayah. As it was, the question was rather hard to read, so I took the liberty of clarifying your English. I hope I expressed the tenor of your original post well. Commented Mar 15, 2012 at 19:23
  • thank you man, I'm Arabian, I'm still learning English.. :)
    – Abudayah
    Commented Mar 15, 2012 at 19:25

3 Answers 3

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Like all UX matters, it depends.

It depends on how you expect users to be reading and viewing your content, where they land within your site and what you believe they'll be looking for.

Do you think a user landing on the homepage will know how to find what they want just by looking at the three tabs provided? Do you think that users going to 'Movies' is likely to have a specific goal in mind, or that they'll be legitimately interested in seeing films ordered by a wide variety of criteria?

The biggest risk with 'combining' content into a small number of pages is that you make that content less discoverable, because a user has to assume that the content they seek exists in one of your 'generalized' pages. That said, combining content types makes sense if it'll all be relevant to a user in a particular workflow. Only you, with your knowledge of the client's domain and customers, can answer that question.

Rather than thinking in terms of 'is it better to have more or less pages?', think in terms of 'What's my user looking for, and how do I indicate to him / her where they need to go to find it?'. Instead of thinking 'how should I organize my content?', think 'what are my user's goals, and what's the ideal workflow to achieve them?'.

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IMO, there's nothing wrong with multiple tabs (that will, hopefully, fit in one row) as long as means of navigation throughout the site do not clash. Too many times a cinema website would have a flash banner for individual movies, a mega menu, left-hand navigation for session times and link in the footer.

Less is more: if I come to your site there are only so many things I'd be looking for. Session times, movie description, how to get there/where to call and pricing/order tickets online. I'd thank you if once I found the movie I wanted to watch I can purchase tickets from that screen directly; or if I drilled down to the cinema complex near me and I'm allowed to just pick a movie from the dropdown list.

Depending on the number of options, it may be appropriate to use main menu buttons rather than tabs per se, as long as the user is always certain of their location on the site.

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I think Jimmy Breck-McKye answer is pretty spot on, however here are some additional aspects I believe you should consider:

  1. How granular do you want the distribution of information that you need multiple tabs.If the information is too granular,then you might end up with a case where you have too little information on each tab and an user must click through multiple tabs to get to the information he wants

  2. How many tabs would overload the user : Now this can be best answered by usability testing or A/B testing but if you have too many tabs you could confuse the user but too little, you could have him looking around in tabs trying to find information rather than just being to determine at a glance with regards to the information he is looking for.

Just my thoughts

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