A current trend in website design is the use of one page websites. While this trend is hot and there is a ton of industry buzz around it, you will not see these templates in our website portfolio or in our theme store. I am, and will be, strongly against the use of them as they go against my fundamental beliefs in web design.
What is a One Page Website?
A one page website is simply a single page website that uses only one HTML page. When clicking on navigation links, the user scrolls down the page or jumps to that particular content’s section. The website may use JavaScript, jQuery, CSS3, or Ajax to accomplish this movement.
Some good articles with examples of single page websites include:
- WDL: 21 Beautiful Examples of Single Page Websites
- DesignModo: 25 New Examples of Single Page Websites
- Smashing Magazine: Exploration Of Single-Page Websites
Big deal right? Why this design trend is popular, unsuspecting WordPress theme buyers are going down a path that can hurt them in the long run. And that is my issue. Cool is great, but it should not hamper form or function.
One Page Websites Can Derail SEO Efforts
For ten years I’ve followed a one keyword (or maybe two) to one page process for on-page SEO. This works because it gives the search engines a piece of quality content to match up to a keyword or phrase. It allows me to create great meta, build links into that page, share that page, and build up the overall relevance of that page all surrounding the keyword phrase. It works and it has served me and my clients well for a decade.
Now let’s try to take that philosophy and covert it to the one page website approach. The average website (if optimized properly) doesn’t have only one or two keywords as a focus. It probably has twenty or maybe fifty or two hundred. How on earth can you adequately target and optimize twenty or fifty keywords with only one single page? You can’t.
While Google (in a recent video called What does Google think of single-page websites?) has said it has become better at understanding and digesting JavaScript and jQuery, Matt Cutts also said one page websites “sometimes work” for SEO. Sometimes? I love Matt, but sometimes he is too kind. Why on earth would you gamble your SEO efforts for a cool website trend and hope that you’re in the sometimes working group? I wouldn’t and I don’t want our clients to either.
If SEO is important to the heath of your website and your company, I highly suggest you leave single page websites to the large brands like Cadillac. They don’t need SEO to survive, but you do, so stick with technology that is known to work.
One Page Websites Can Confuse Users
I frequently compare website visitors to toddlers – I love toddlers. Because of this association, I try and make sure our websites are easy to digest and easy to use. I use toddlers not to signify a lack of intelligence, but to highlight a short attention span.
Most website visitors are multi-tasking and they are easily distracted, as is the case of my beloved toddler. To keep visitors on a website, you need to make website content and navigation easy. You can’t expect visitors to think through cute design to get to where they want to go or to locate information they need. If I have to “figure out” how to use your website, your website is not worth my time. As with the toddler, I am constantly multitasking so my attention span is short.
Real websites include multiple pages designed around a users’ needs and the website owner’s goals. Let the visitor pick their path based on their needs and then present them with information created just for them. I call this persona-based navigation and content presentation. We can do this with a multiple page website, but we cannot easily do this with a single page website.
If you’re selling to technology savvy website visitors, then a single page website might be just the trick. If you’re selling to the average Joe, skip the trendy code and go old school.
Website Owners Are Reliant on Coders
At the start of this article I stated a few different types of programming languages used to create these fancy single page websites. To refresh your memory, they were JavaScript, jQuery, CSS3, and Ajax. Let me ask you – how many of those are you proficient in using? Zero? Me too. That’s why I have a coding team. Unfortunately the average small business owner does not.
If you can’t write the fancy code used to create these single page websites, how will you edit it moving forward? Your template does it for you? Great. Now let me ask you how much flexibility your template offers in making changes to the presentation? Probably very little since it would be difficult to code the various scenarios.
Again I come back to big brands like Cadillac. They have in-house coders and they have the staff to maintain these complex, one page websites. The typical small business owner does not.
You Are Not GM and You Are Not Selling Cadillacs in Morocco
One of the articles I linked to above provided Cadillac as an example of a one page website. I’ll admit that their Morocco website portal is pretty cool. While I own a GM vehicle and I was born and bred in Michigan, this website annoyed me to no end. Very few companies are GM and very few companies can produce and maintain a website of this caliber. But the average user doesn’t know it and they want to emulate the brand.
I’ve received emails from small business owners who want an SEO friendly website that is also one page. They want to appear at the top of page one on Google for twenty must have keywords. And they’d also like it to look just like brand XYZ who is a publicly held company. These are all nice objectives but they are ones I cannot deliver and the small business owner cannot afford to create or maintain website with all these requirements.
Know Who You Are and What You Need
If you are a small business owner and you’re planning a redesign of your existing website, remember to take a step back and document who you are and what you really need. Look past the design trends and focus on what really matters to you and your website visitor. Then contact us and we’ll help you get there with a website you can afford, one that is SEO friendly, and one that you can maintain yourself over time. That my friends is the beauty of WordPress and why I love it as much as I do.
Great piece, Rebecca. While they might look cool, they can come with all sorts of issues. On top of the ones mentioned here, I find quite a few of them to be a pain in the ass when viewing on mobile. Instead of being able to comment, all I get are endless streams of other articles on the site appearing, forever pushing the comment box down. Grrr…
I hadn’t even thought about the mobile side of things!
The growing buzz about these types of websites has been bugging me and then the influx of requests from small business owners to create them grew too. I was at my limit and I needed to vent a little.
I’m betting we could come up with about 50 reasons why these types of websites don’t work for the average company and why they should be avoided.
Just 50? 😉
I forgot a zero and I really meant 500. LOL!
Actually, I’ve been under the impression that mobile is the _reason_ for the growing popularity of these designs. Swiping is not as annoying as scrolling and menus on phones are for many. Those “born online” seem to like the trend, anyhow, if anecdotal input from local teens is any indicator. The comment box issue is hilarious, though. Points to a lack of foresight/consideration of the use case.
Hard not to agree with Rebecca’s points, though. I’ve personally _never_ done a one-page site except as a one-off for a friend who just wanted his contact information and some flyer content on an “under construction” page…
Bah.
Clarification: “Swiping is not as annoying as scrolling, and for many people, menus on phones annoy.”
Lol that sentence was awful. Still a bit muddled but at least my meaning is clearer.
Another problem with single page designs that many people don’t realize until it too late is “Quality Score”. We have had a number of clients that have scrapped their single page designs because its was killing their Pay-Per-Click campaigns.
I totally forgot about PPC and quality scores. Excellent point Dave. Thanks for sharing.
Websites that use some of these technologies to change their content presentation bug the crud out of me when they don’t allow you to link to a specific piece of content. If I want to share something on their website with someone I don’t want to go through some long, “go to this website, click here, scroll down to that, move your mouse sideways, stand on your head in the rain and then you can read what I’m referring you to.”
I just want to pass along a link.
Hi,
I saw that website. Its really confusing . from an end user perspective I am unable to gauge what they are trying to convey.
I agree that it will derail seo efforts.
I am a java programmer for past 15 years. After learning seo I am getting paying customers from my website. before that no leads because my website architecture was not correct from seo perspective and lead capture was not there.
I also agree with you that website owners are reliant on programmers. most website programmers dont learn basic seo or dont want to educate customers.
basic seo is easy to learn. customers dont put effort.
customers automatically assume that developers know seo. in actuality its not. website marketing is different from programming.
regards
vinodh
I agree and have been having these conversations with myself in my head along with directing clients away from these sites. Now I can include the mobile use complications to back up my advice. Thanks! They are confusing for some to navigate, but they can look “cool”.
I do agree to some extent that it can hinder SEO and yet it does need code savvy designers to do this. But that whats people like me strive for, something to test our development knowledge.
If a client wants it, and I feel it will work well for them, then why not? I have never built a 1 page scrolling website that doesn’t look good on a mobile either.
Usually there will be the odd side page anyway for long pages of content (SEO freindly content at that)
People like me have a job in the web industry because there is demand for new interesting ways to showcase their brand, if everyone went down the wordpress simple theme then i’d be out of a job!
Good observation…WordPress has created an online “big box” look which I tire of seeing everywhere. The single page sites are exciting and compact and a wonderful option for for a wide range of customer. While Google insists that content be king, I think people are getting tired of reading flat and pointless content which serves only to satisfy SEO requirements. Generic is the last category any designer/developer wants their creations to fall under…the public will demand something over and above the WPressy look soon enough and the single page look is heading there…thankfully.
Good post about a trend getting in the way of achieving results. You could try steering clients to an abbreviated home page that, while still parallax, utilizes teaser copy and lazy-loaded images for relevant sections, that can then link over to separate topic-specific pages for SEO.
However, I was driven to comment by this line
“You Are Not GM and You Are Not Selling Cadillacs in Morocco”
I loved that statement. The more we work at educating our clients and helping them zero in on their market, the better.
Glad you liked my frank humor Ben. I talk to way to many people each week that want to be GM on a budget of $100. They don’t realize the tactics of GM won’t work for them because they don’t have the powerhouse branding in place.
I’m all about big dreams and having massive goals, but the means to get the ends need to fit the situation.
Some good points made, and there is a bit of a ‘trend’ for one pagers at the moment, we just launched one for ourselves last week, not to fit in with current trends but because it helped tell a flowing story and we don’t rely on SEO to get new business.
I think the beauty of the web is that there’s lots of different options available to suit people needs and it’s about educating the client, some people ARE GM selling Cadillacs in Morocco, and one pagers do have a lot of benefits for telling stories and creating a more immersive experience, for example the new(ish) http://www.apple.com/mac-pro/
There’s also the option depending on the content of the site to create a few ‘one pagers’ within a site, i.e. each product has it own one pager feel.
As for mobile, that was the first consideration when we did ours and a good designer in this day and age should have no trouble making a one pager look good on a mobile.
Just my 2pence worth 🙂
Oh I love the Mac website you shared. I’ve been BFFs with my Macbook Pro for about five years.
I do agree. One page websites do have a place in larger businesses or certain niche markets. They just don’t work well with the average small business folk who typically read our blog posts, use our services, or rely on SEO for traffic.
While your thoughts on the seo ranking of single page websites is true, I disagree with all of the rest arguments.
Single page websites aren’t for everyone but for small business that doesn’t have much to say or have complex hierarchy of pages and information to provide to users single page websites are the ultimate solution to wrap up the whole thing in a nutshell I also disagree with the confusion part if the sections are layed out in a neat and organised form they get crystal clear and help users understand the product or service faster than in normal websites plus the average time spent on a single website is usually more than normal websites.
About customisation and flexibility it can get as flexible as you want it to be and there are zero limitations in this issue
Finally on mobile everything is controllable thanks to media queries so if you get a bad mobile experience with a single page website blame the developer not the theory
Thanks for the comments Zyad. I appreciate hearing views that oppose my own and I’m sure our readers do too!
Website Owners Are Reliant on Coders
This one struck a chord. Websites shouldn’t be a simple 1-2-3 drag and drop process as they are indeed complicated. This is perpetuating the unfortunate misconception that websites are quick, cheap, and easy to “throw together”. Think about the designers, developers, and programmers that put in serious time and effort to provide excellent services to their clients only to end up being jerked around when it comes time for payment or worse getting dragged into a legal battle. If you own a car do you repair it yourself? Do you take on major house renovations by yourself or do you hire a contractor?
Great article and very thought provoking. I agree with Zyad and Nick as business owners are looking for an affordable solution and the one page page if executed properly (see the examples that Ms Gill quotes) can look efficiently beautiful. To quote, Paul Rand, “Design is so simple, that’s why it is so complicated.”