Submitted on:  06/07/2007

One-page sites have got a pretty bad name for themselves; they tend to be associated with 'get rich quick' scams; a five to ten screen letter claiming previous success, and wittering on until you get to the bottom and give away your credit card details.

This is a fairly benign example: www.smartmoneysecrets dot com

But are they so bad, except for those associations?

Often, yes. A website needs marketing, whether it's one page or 4,000. if your visitors have nowhere else 'on site' to go, then they'll leave, almost certainly before they've thought about the Great Deal being offered. Plus a web page can only be optimised for a couple of terms, and so it may be hard for a one-page site to get on the search engine 'map'.  The site may miss out on many search terms that couldn't be accomodated, not to mention the searches you never anticipated, but your larger site just happened to include those key words.

So when ARE they justified?

Broadly, when there are only one or two phrases that matter.

It has become perfectly acceptable to make a one-page site for a CV. This works on the basis that the only searches that matter are searches for the name of the author. In my view, that's a waste; Unless you are a pretty boring person, chances are there's more than one string to your bow, and to do yourself justice, you'll need more pages, both for space, and for effective optimization for search engines. For example, if you are ambitious, you'll want to link your name to more than one skill. If you want to widen your horizons, you may want to emphasise your experience in different cities or different career branches.

You may just have too much to say for one page. Tanya Merone, for example, has won awards for her Online Portfolio; but even on broadband, it takes an age to download, aided by the logos of everyone who admired the site. She's had to minimise any discussion or display of her great skills, for space reasons. And it's appallingly badly optimized; as her name is fairly uncommon, she gets away with that. But wouldn't the site be better if she subdivided it over several pages, displaying her good works - and with all the bandwidth-heavy twaddle relegated to an 'Awards and bootlickers' page?

For me, the only time a one-page site works is when it is about just one item; for example, a client recently bought an art work. She has no intention of selling it in the near future, if ever - but she wants to be sure the item doesn't get forgotten by the art world, 'just in case'. So she wanted a site to describe the item, and place it clearly in the canon of the artist.

Rachel Whiteread's Charity Box does exactly that, no more, no less. It provides a concise record of the piece, with gentle optimisation for the artist's name and the name of the piece. Why gentle? Because the item is not for sale. If it was, then the rules would change. the site will (I hope) be enough for the site to crop up regularly enough.

To assist it, I've updated the wikipedia entry to include it - the nofollow link from Wikipedia to the site is quite enough - and provided a couple of links from established sites. As the site picks up one or two organic links, I'll remove the 'in house' links - not that I think they're spammy, but any links from the art world will almost certainly be more content-related, and sufficient for purpose.

Sites like this avoid all the pitfalls of most one-page sites; no excessive marketing needed, no complex SEO needs, no lengthy text needing to be pruned or scrolled down to, not even (in this case) a need for much in the way of images, though a panoramic view in an embedded video was one thought.

So to conclude, a one-page site can work, provided you have one-page content, and no more. The alternative in this case would have been to add a vaguely related page to another site, with a real possibility of visitor confusion.