{"id":481,"date":"2016-03-15T15:39:27","date_gmt":"2016-03-15T19:39:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.fantastic-realities.com\/studio_blog\/?p=481"},"modified":"2016-03-15T15:41:52","modified_gmt":"2016-03-15T19:41:52","slug":"there-can-be-only-one","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.fantastic-realities.com\/studio_blog\/2016\/03\/there-can-be-only-one\/","title":{"rendered":"There Can Be Only One"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"OnePress<\/a>
OnePress<\/a> – developed by FameThemes<\/a>. Perfectly lovely, but\u2026<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I got this particular wasp up my pant leg<\/strong> reviewing my morning emails. Among the pile was a recurring newsletter I subscribe to\u200a\u2014\u200aeWebDesign<\/a>\u00a0,with products and coding resources of interest to Graphic and Web Designers and Developers. In today\u2019s batch was \u201cA Free Single-Page WordPress Theme\u201d. If you\u2019ve spent any time on the web lately, these have been all the freakin\u2019 rage, especially for startups, announcements and entrepreneur sites.<\/p>\n

A quick look gleaned me this gushing hose of marketing copy. Yes, I know, marketing copy. Imagine that.<\/p>\n

\u2028\u2028\u201cIf you\u2019re a fan of the scrolling single-page parallax style themes, OnePress is a new one on WordPress.org that may pique your interest. After less than a month in the official directory, it has already been installed on more than 3,000 websites. OnePress was developed by the folks at FameThemes using Bootstrap version 4. It is suitable for business, portfolio, and agency websites.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cThe theme features a full-screen background image with action buttons in the first major section. Scrolling further down reveals an about section, services, a video lightbox, an animated counter, team section, latest news, and contact form\u2026\u201d <\/em>– WP Tavern<\/a><\/p>\n

You can go there if you like<\/em><\/a><\/strong>, check \u2019em out, but I had kind of already hit saturation point. Oooooh look, Paralaxxxxx\u2026 Bootstrap\u2026 hugh hugh hugh uff<\/em>. But once I saw, \u201cinstalled on more than 3,000 websites,\u201d I was pretty motivated to move on with my day. Despite the titanic humongousness of the modern Web, there are still apparently already over THREE THOUSAND SITES out there that already look like this<\/strong><\/em>. I am pretty sure I have already seen a few hundred of them, and I\u2019m bored to tears. Even with a free theme, the amount of customization and get-under-the-hood tweaking and custom graphics to make this thing stand out from the mob, it would be worth it to spend a few minutes more to find something a bit more distinctive for a project. Or purchase a more fully featured theme for a relatively minor fee, to get much closer to the project\u2019s aim.<\/p>\n

Clients get this backwards all the time<\/em>. \u201cI want you to use a free<\/em> theme, keep our costs down.\u201d Well, fine. But if I have to spend 8 hours at my fair, but non-trivial, designer\u2019s rate to customize it and research add in a half dozen plug-ins to get to the desired functionality. So much for any savings\u200a\u2014\u200aseveral times over. But on the other hand many clients would much prefer a set, low, flat fee for projects, and burn my time with 10,000 tweaks and additions.<\/p>\n

But why are these one-page things so damn popular<\/em><\/strong>, despite the painful sameness of so many of the gorram things? Many better designers than me have already belabored the fact that Responsive and Mobile-first design techniques have served to create a maddening blandness and similarity to the look of the web. Sites bend to follow the design paradigms of IOS and Material Design, riffing off of Bootstrap and Foundation\u2026 It\u2019s kind of what it is, given the limitations of the technology, but it\u2019s getting harder to create distinctive designs that people will remember. But yes, it IS still worth it to get something up and running that\u2019s working, with your development time shortened, and that the client will pay for. That\u2019s often still superior at the end of the week to something beautiful and brilliant, but unfinished and broken, and takes months and months to test and tweak, with either the meter running or your hourly rate sinking.<\/p>\n

The killer app is the one that ships<\/em>, people.<\/p>\n

I know that this has been said before, but needs to be said louder and heard more often. CONTENT IS KING<\/strong><\/em>. And while you can advise, suggest, and even refer copywriters, illustrators, photographers and other creator types, and create stuff yourself for them\u200a\u2014\u200acontent is still ultimately the site owner\u2019s final responsibility. No one knows more about their topic than the site owner\u200a\u2014\u200amost particularly and critically the unique details that separate them from an ocean of competitors or colleagues. I\u2019ll remind folks that the \u201cwww.,\u201d that a lot of folks consider quaint and pass\u00e9<\/em> and unnecessary in this age of smarter browsers, is still the protocol, and it still stands for World Wide Web. That\u2019s the size of the audience, your competition, and the backdrop you are trying to stand out from. Better bring something to the conversation, and you\u2019ve heard the one bout bringing a knife to a gunfight. Content.<\/p>\n

\"I<\/a>
Remember this? I wish<\/em>\u2026 and so do a lot of site owners, apparently.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

But if you\u2019re a startup, or still in development mode. You may not HAVE much content, or a lot of content not ready for public consumption. If this is the case, a single page site is an appropriate way to still carve out some web presence, and it might be enough and just fine. But I\u2019ve been down this road, where a client has a lot they have to say, or should be saying, and just don\u2019t get their content together. A one-page site is a convenient opt-out of developing their material, or getting something up quick. That\u2019s fine if you put it up while developing a deeper, more fully-featured site. But so many will launch it and kind of forget it. Your mileage will probably vary.<\/p>\n

\"Stack\"<\/a>
What an over-stuffed, miles high, One-Page Web Site feels like\u2026.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Some sites will fail the other<\/em> direction,<\/strong> and try to keep all their content<\/em> on that one glorious page. I gotta tell ya, even with an iPhone scrolling smooth as butter, \u201cinfinite scroll\u201d can get frakkin\u2019 tedious. It used to be that the benchmark was that if you had more than three screens of content, go ahead and make a new page. But in the mobile ascendant age, a blurb<\/em> can be five screens high on a Galaxy S2. So people are getting a little more comfortable with scrolling down for content. But now we have single page sites that are MILES high. Getting to the footer for the \u201ccontact us\u201d link for the email address in one of these things is like riding a slow mine elevator to magma depth or a deep submersible to the bottom of a mid-ocean trench where no light shines. If you\u2019ve this much content, do your site visitors a favor, and go ahead and bust that stuff up into navigable pages.<\/p>\n

And guess what? Your site will feel bigger, better organized, more together and professional, and less like a PILE. Your website shouldn\u2019t feel like that stack of papers, bills, sketches, research, and design books teetering on the corner of your desk. I\u2019ll own that. Guilty guilty guilty\u2026 My<\/em> stack has a pair of gardening gloves under a copy of the Joy of Digital Photography. <\/em><\/p>\n

I will<\/em> read that. Really. After I finish these emails\u2026<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

A version of this post appears in MVP on <\/a>Medium<\/a>.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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