Is one page enough?

How things have changed! Not only from the past to today, but the rate in which it continues to change, even as I write.

The past, for the web, as we use and know it today started circa 1990. The question is for you to decide if your site is up-to-date. The design rules in those days were to have lots and lots of pages. These had to be short so that one did not have to scroll very far and navigation was more-often-than-not achieved with the aid of graphical links if you wanted a site that presented well. The masthead of pages invariably consisted of graphical banners that consumed a significant amount of the ‘home’ page, if not all pages. Horizontal scrolling was accepted, although not happily.

To make pages lively, animated GIF images were used and if you were really swish, a string of Flash elements were used to produce a whole myriad of novel, moving effects. Text was manipulated with formatting and a variety of fonts and colours while images were a low resolution small-scale presentation with limited colour rendering. Page layouts were based on table structures and download times had to be strictly adhered to if you wanted any chance to be rated by search engines. There were many of these but who remembers Alta Vista or Lycos and a string of others? Today, Google rules supreme and people would be hard pushed to name more than two search engines.

Indeed, the word ‘Google’ has become a transitive verb and is defined in our dictionaries. Mobile devices have taken over as the common browsing tool and scrolling is achieved by flicking a page up or down. The aim of processing power in these devices is to allow screens full of content to fly by at unreadable speeds. If you look closely, the trend has become making websites as single pages because scrolling the old 25 lines of screen space is no longer a designer’s hated restriction. At this point, it is fair to ask whether a single page website will perform as well as those designed to the old multi-page concepts?

Matt Cutts, while still at Google, assured us Google has learnt to read most of the codes used in web design and even the old no-no of JavaScript was no longer an impediment. That means that from a SEO point of view, the old restraints no longer exist. One of the bug bears was Flash but this has totally fallen out of favour as far more elegant and search engine-friendly techniques are now available.

Interestingly, page sizes in 1995 were around 14 kb whereas today they are commonly around 2Mb and simply put about 2000 times larger content-wise. Today’s trends show we are rapidly heading to 3Mb page content.

The increases are due to far superior graphics and images. Many designers, including myself, no longer specify fonts within our code but just import them in real-time from various font libraries. The same can be said for much of the scripted code sections used to create some of the exciting effects now so common. To make things zoom, slide, jump, spin and explode is very simple today.

Fonts were a real problem because unless the user’s computer had your called-up font installed, the web page would pick whatever the default font was. Sometimes the results were disastrous; so yes, downloading fonts from libraries in real-time is a huge boon.

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Design concepts have changed greatly and we now have material design, which encourages clean layouts. These of course aid in serving vision-impaired users as well as providing easy access to the meaty stuff called content. And content is still king, perhaps even more so than in the past.

We are also not just incorporating little windows with video, but page backgrounds with full motion video. So what about one-page websites? From my point of view, I am blessed with a few wonderful and brave clients who allow me to use their sites as test beds. They permit design changes just so we can test search engine responses and equally important, client responses.

These days, the first page you see when visiting a website is called a landing page. With careful consideration, sufficient information can be included on that one page to satisfy the punter and the search engine. Sections can be defined with clever visual layouts or colourful boundaries. Content is précised to give an overview of all the features and benefits that the business offers and contact information, including all the clever features of Google Maps are included.

Links have to be coded so that they also respond to the quirky code of mobile devices. For example, a telephone number, if clicked or tapped on a mobile device, must bring up the dialler and complete the call.

Add high quality scaleable graphics and the website is well on its way to becoming a very useful marketing tool in our new world and full of pizzazz and wow! All this because of the flicking motion that now scrolls a page.

I have two sites operating with just one such page and another handful that also have additional pages findable via the ubiquitous ‘hamburger’ navigation symbol. All of them have retained their ranking and ‘findability’, demonstrating that this approach is valid.

Since the underlying aim of a site is to generate return visits, I still add extra pages that perhaps provide additional information relating to product, area, or even the local weather or history of its surroundings. All of which may be of additional interest to a potential client. It would be unwise to omit your declaimer or privacy policy pages. These too benefit your site because they will just display more links to your domain when searching.

It is important to divide your page into meaningful sections, otherwise they just become very long screens full of text and make information difficult to find. The punter would very quickly leave such a site out of sheer frustration and you would have defeated the reason for your website.

So by all means bring your site into the 21st century with confidence and modernise the design.