Is the five page static website dead?
In days gone by, the five-pager was the mainstay of the web design business – Home, About us, Services, Testimonials, and Contact us. Like an online brochure, it provided small businesses with an online presence, and it provided their customers with the bare minimum of interaction.
At work, we recently took the decision that we weren’t going to do them any more. Just about every customer wants to manage their own content – which is their right – as a bare minimum. Many want blogs, feeds, fora, interactive maps, and other widgets.
The good news is that there are many pieces of open source software that make such requests simple, even trivial. WordPress divides opinion as a CMS, but I’ve found that with plugins like cforms and this sitemap generator make development speedy and simple.
Most CMS worth their salt produce valid (x)html, so there’s really no reason not to offer the customer these functionalities any more – join me in ditching the five pager as a dinosaur from the past!
Hi. How much of the web design you do is based on remembering and hand-typing CSS / PHP and how much is done using visual editing, cut/paste from a file of your favorite saved codes and then tweaking them?
I use CSS, but I have a collection of my commonly used CSS and can cut/paste it in to pages and later tweak them. I use Dreamweaver mostly. I’m wondering what would qualify me to say I can use CSS on a CV.
Thanks for your help.
Hi Matt, thanks for the comment!
I would say that as long as you have a good understanding of the CSS you’re using, it doesn’t matter if you have a code ‘library’ as it were. If it speeds up development, and it is appropriate to use it, go for it!
I would encourage everyone learning web design / development to hand code as much as possible rather than use a WYSIWIG editor though – that’s the way to really gain an understanding of what you’re doing.
Cheers, John
[...] I mentioned before, no-one wants a static site anymore; I believe CMS Made Simple offers the simplest content management solution [...]
Hi, I have over 25 years experience in the computer industry, I can even remember paper tape, coding sheets and the like. I still hand knit my code, it saves having to debug code generated problems. I know exactly what and where every thing is.
It does not matter is you are talking CSS or a script, take an old mans advice; avoid code generation software until you have master your art.
regards
George
These days a website design needs to be optimised for search engines. Those web pages that have key words in the title have more chance of getting higher in the listings. Giving the customer access to all content is a mistake as key word density goes out of the picture. I would agree that the old days of producing a 5 page website are gone, but there are other reasons why!
I think it is now time to have something more than a static site. I still remember when I was very happy to build sites in simple html and javascript but now everything has been changes. We can customize our wordpress blogs into directories and can sell the stuff. I think there is nothing easy than that because it can be done without any effort with help of plugoins. We can do it even better in Drupal.
Hi
I agree – we have even learnt dreamweaver to make our own website amends – I don’t think we have done too shoddy a job! Click our link and give me feedback maybe??
What a fascinating subject. I would say about 1 out of every ten prospective clients who contact us are interested in nothing more than a 5-page site. We try to encourage them to have more pages to increase their long-tail search ranking opportunities. In general, you are right – most clients want to move beyond the 5-pager because they want to renovate their old 5-page site into something more! Today’s typical website visitor expects more “wow” from a site.
The worst thing I hate about the class ‘five pager’ is the generic, undescriptive nav of: Home, About us, Services, Testimonials, and Contact us. I always try to ensure websites have descriptive text in their nav
Amen to the end of the 5 page websites. You are absolutely right about the need for content management. “Content is king” becomes more true each day.