The one-page website

by on May 21, 2010 under Design

Here in the creative room at centresource, we’ve been noticing a new trend popping up with more and more frequency in the world of web design: the one-page website. For a creative, it’s an example of yet another way that designers and developers are figuring out how to break down the walls of traditional websites. And we love it.

Sure, some will argue that there are a slew of cons to this approach: loading time, tricky navigation, having too much content in one small space, etc. When you create something so different from the standard design-style that users are comfortable with, will they get confused? What about IE6? (Shudder.) As with anything new and innovative, there will always be concerns or question marks. Our Rich Media Designer and Interactive Guru, Jared Scheel, will be following up this post later from a more practical approach. He’ll explore what one-page sites do to your SEO, how to get around loading issues, and other things in a technical language that will more than likely go over my head a bit. I’m just here to discuss the pretty… cut me a little slack.

Speaking of pretty, we can’t dive too deep into this subject without bragging a little about one of our own projects. When it came time to design an online identity for beer distributor BountyBev, our designer Jason O’Brien (fondly referred to around here as Shamus) took the chance to do something fresh. Their one-page site that we launched in March is generating plenty of online buzz and to further dote on Jason, we’ve opened with it as our first example of great one-page designs listed below. The site perfectly highlights some of the pros to working in this format: innovative design, centralized content, and an enjoyable user experience.

Our latest team member, and new Creative Lead Jason Jones, was quick to chime in with some of his personal experience with one page sites. He’s worked with tons of musicians and artists in refining and shaping their online identities, and he’s found that one page sites are often the way to go. (We’ve included several of his projects in our examples below because — all bias aside — they were awesome enough to make the cut.) Jason reasons that musicians most often need their sites to serve as landing pages — a way for their fans to connect with them and find them in other places like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and iTunes. Combine a great design with the artist’s blog, Twitter feed, music player and social media links and you have everything they need… in one place.

Here are some great examples of one-page sites we’re seeing around the web. Stay tuned for some blog goodness from Jared on how practical (or unpractical!) this approach is.

BountyBevCrush + LovelyMatt WertzMorphix Design StudiosSixteen CitiesSkittlesFuel Brand IncYes, I Said Yes!

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  • http://twitter.com/yesyesisaidyes andrew house

    Thank you so much for highlighting our site, we are super proud of how it turned out. Our web guru is Daniel Givens and he did a great job of taking our ideas and making them work in a one page layout. Our last site got too full of links and people just were not seeing all that they should have when they visited. Daniel condensed them all into a great way to have people see all of our work in one place. He even color coded the video types so that you can sort by type of project. There are a lot of really nice little touches that make me so happy that we had him do the site. His website is dgivens.com and you can see other stuff that he has done there! Thanks again for the attention!

    http://www.yesisaidyes.com

  • http://twitter.com/yesyesisaidyes andrew house

    Thank you so much for highlighting our site, we are super proud of how it turned out. Our web guru is Daniel Givens and he did a great job of taking our ideas and making them work in a one page layout. Our last site got too full of links and people just were not seeing all that they should have when they visited. Daniel condensed them all into a great way to have people see all of our work in one place. He even color coded the video types so that you can sort by type of project. There are a lot of really nice little touches that make me so happy that we had him do the site. His website is dgivens.com and you can see other stuff that he has done there! Thanks again for the attention!

    http://www.yesisaidyes.com