Single-Page Websites: A Web Design Trend Worth Adopting?
A few years ago, one of my clients referred me to a developer who wanted to partner with a copywriter. She would build the websites and I would supply the copy and SEO. Before we began our first project, I asked for a wireframe so I could get a sense for what each of the web pages needed to look like. I was shocked by what I received.
The website sketched out in the wireframe had only one page. There were six sections dedicated to the pages you’d find on a traditional business website—Home, About, Team, Services, Testimonials, and Contact. But each section of the single-page website was much smaller than I was used to, maybe only four or five sentences dedicated to each of the “pages”.
I had so many questions for the developer; the first of which was:
Why?????????
After I gave my brain time to cool down, I decided to look more closely at the website she was proposing and put together a list of questions that more practically addressed my concerns:
- Did the client care about SEO?
- What would this do to the website’s speed?
- Would there be negative implications for mobile?
- Wouldn’t the navigation be confusing for visitors accustomed to multi-page websites?
- What about a blog? Didn’t the client mention content marketing on the phone?
- Would this help or hurt conversions?
Based on my understanding of how websites worked and how users interacted with them, the choice to build a single-page website just didn’t make sense. It seemed unnatural and counterintuitive.
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