There are fundamental rhetorical and organizational reasons for subdividing any large body of information, whether it is delivered on the printed page or in a World Wide Web site. Underlying all organizational schemes are the limitations of the human brain in holding and remembering information. Cognitive psychologists have known for decades that most people can only hold about four to seven discrete chunks of information in short-term memory. The goal of most organizational schemes is to keep the number of local variables the reader must keep in short-term memory to a minimum, using combination of graphic design and layout conventions along with editorial division of information into discrete units. The way people seek out and use information also suggests that smaller, discrete units of information are more functional and easier to navigate through than long, undifferentiated units.
Most Web sites contain reference information that people seek in small units.
Users rarely read long contiguous passages of text from computer screens, and most people who are seeking a specific piece of information will be annoyed to have to scan long blocks of text to find what they are after. Small chunks of related information are also easier to organize into modular units of information that all share a consistent organization scheme that can form the basis for hypertext links within your Web site. The four basic steps in organizing your information are to divide it into logical units, establish a hierarchy of importance and generality, use the hierarchy to structure relationships among chunks, then analyze the functional and aesthetic success of your system. Chunking information Most information on the World Wide Web consists of short reference documents that are read non-sequentially. This is particularly true of educational, corporate, government, and organizational web sites used to distribute information that might have been printed on paper a few years ago.