Hard to use paginators

If you have a lot of content, you likely paginate, hopefully to increase usability and decrease bandwidth bills, as opposed to showing me more ads. If you do, please use a paginator that’s easy to use. Here’s an example of a paginator that I don’t like



Why don’t I like it?
Well, the two most common actions at this point are:"Go to the next page" and "Go to the page where content I’m looking for is likely to reside". Neither of those actions involves going to the last page (except by coincidence), and yet it’s the largest option by far. In fact the Last button section takes up 748 pixels (44 x 17), while the next button receives only 289 (17x17).

I’m currently looking at an alphabetically sorted list of options. If I know that the types of items I’m looking for happen to start with "S" how do I jump there? Do I start on page 5? 11? 51? 101? Likely none of the above.

Consider a pagination tool like the following.



It’s clear what you’re looking at, you can move on to the next page, as well as jump to any logical position within the pagination system with ease.
Now I know this is harder than traditional pagination systems. After all MySQL conveniently optimizes out calls to things like SELECT COUNT(*) FROM table;. Past that a quick bit of math and you know how many pages you need, and you can set offsets quite easily using a LIMIT clause or similar.

When it comes to web development, or anything else "Where there’s muck, there’s brass". Just because a problem is hard doesn’t mean you shouldn’t solve it. Users like sites they can navigate (remember many users exhibit either link dominance or mixed behavior when seeking content), they reward sites they like with sales, more visits, links, blog posts, etc.