It’s been out for a while now, but this morning I was all excited to go check out what time.com considers the 50 best websites of 2008.  I’m greeted by the headline “The Best in the Online World” and, with building anticipation, I click enter…only to realize that in order to see these 50 sites I will have to click through 51 pages.  Putting aside the fact that this math doesn’t seem to work out right, I’m immediately put off and slightly annoyed.

And I know I can’t be the only one to feel this way.

Now I have to read a paragraph, and wait for my browser to load, read a paragraph, wait, etc. It’s a definite time killer, and more likely than not my browser will crash at some point down the list.  Plus it makes browsing over the list quickly impossible.  I realize that I will miss the witty commentary about each site – but sometimes I just want a quick glance over.

This trend has gotten so bad that people on social bookmarking sites like Digg have started to post the actual list in the comments section – with captions like “save your time, here’s the list:” or “great list, but takes forever to load – here it is:” or they get annoyed too and take this route:

Now, I’m not talking about 50 item lists spread over 3 or 4 pages, that is completely reasonable – it actually decreases loading time of the page and browsing the list is still a valid option.  Its the 1:1 ratio of item to page that is the problem.

In theory I understand the reasoning behind the decision.  You stand to bring in more advertising revenue by placing different ads on each page, and they may get a boost in the search engines because each page is getting lots of traffic.  But these “benefits” come at the cost of usability and in my opinion no site should be willing to sacrifice that.