Websites of the initial internet era in the 90’s were comprised of basic HTML and little more, with very little in the way of design put into them, until the creation of ‘CSS’ (Cascading Style Sheets) came along and became more prominently used, allowing for a greater range of style to be added to the bare bones HTML pages.
Before web design and development really developed into a science, nobody focused on user acquisition and/or retention, and UX/UI (user experience and interface) wasn’t a thing – everyone just wanted to get their web page up on the internet and they were all set – they now had an internet presence. I’ve seen a few examples of websites that are still stuck in the 90’s – though thankfully, everyone now at least uses some CSS. One method of modernising your website and improving the experience is to create a single page website – or landing page.
Landing Pages
If your website doesn’t have a vast amount of information to display, yet segregates it into different tabs so the user has to click through to find what they are looking for and reload the page – that might not be the best way to get that information across. An alternative and more pleasing browsing experience would be to present all this information on one scrollable page where you can still link to each section with tabs or buttons, and not have to reload the page. I know for a fact that when I browse a website on my mobile, I much prefer to seamlessly scroll down rather than clicking left right and centre to navigate. What we are talking about here is a landing page – i.e. the first page the user lands on, which should be designed to reel them in, grab their attention and present them with all the information they need in order to engage them, so it can still be used if you have more content to show on other pages.
In 2019, mobile devices were responsible for over 60% of internet traffic, so the design of your website should definitely give equal consideration to mobile and desktop users. Why make users click one, two, or three times to reach a contact page, when they could easily just scroll down to find it?
One further benefit of this is that if you design your own website, you’ve now only one page (albeit a longer one) to focus on!
If you want more information on website usability and UX/UI Design, Googles Material Design articles are a good place to begin.