Usability and Readability of Content Heavy Confluence Pages

Question

Greetings,

Background: I am senior technical writer with a background in Instructional Design, an innate dislike of scrolling, and perchance for creating knowledge nuggets.

Challenge: I have find myself, as a new Confluence User, struggling with how best deal with content-heavy legacy pages. I would be very interested in how others have dealt with this challenge.

Case in point: A page that contains an ever-growing list of code blocks. The code macro was used, there is a TOC, but you could scroll forever. The page layout is in one block. I have been told that nesting code blocks into tables didn't really work.

If I was using OneNote or a regular publishing environment, even SharePoint, I could easily create a subpage, subfolder etc.  But I aim struggling as I learn Confluence to find an efficient approach to my challenge.

I think, given my current level of Confluence knowledge, that my best option is to start by creating child pages based upon the current TOC. But I am challenged as to how to do this easily, even some of the sections contain a large number of code block macros.

Another aspect that will hopefully address the scrolling issue is to change the child page layout to a two or three column version style might be useful.

Would love to hear from folks who have this same challenge, and have hopefully prevailed.

Nils Bier _K15t_ · Answer

Hi Julie,

If you want to keep the content on a single page, but want to limit the scrolling, I'd also tend to use the Expand macro mentioned by Ada.

Alternatively you could also have a look at the Expando Macro, which basically does the same as the Expand macro, but on heading level - if you enter an Expando Macro to a H1 element for example, all content will automatically collapsed until the next H1 element.

Cheers,
Nils

Ada Chen · Answer

Child pages and the Children macro are a great way to break up the content.

If you want to keep the content on the same page, and just hide it while you're scrolling, you can also use the Expand macro: https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/expand-macro-223222352.html

Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Answer

On a "heavy" page, select the stuff you want to move to a "sub page", click "create", (ideally, select a template that has a two or three column layout), give it a name, then paste the content.  Save it, go back to the parent and remove the bit you just did.

Think about adding the "children" macro to the parent page so people can see where you've moved stuff to.