Ricky’s Online Business Blog

Have you come across an one-page web sites before?  I bet you have.  A typical one-page web site consists of one page only.  Normally it’s a long sales letter for only one product or service.

When you see the catchy words and sentences at the top of the page, you may be tempted to scroll down to read the rest.  You may find out more about the product, its benefits, some customer testimonials, and of course a link to buy it.

Normally there is no link to any other page on the same web site where you can find more out more about the company, the product or service.  All information is contained in one single page.

Such one-page web sites have existed for more than one decade since the 90’s, advocated by Internet marketing gurus such as the late Corey Rudl.  However, nowadays many still advocate the use of one-page web sites to sell product.  Perhaps it may still be working.

For me, I normally consider such web site as mere advertisement, sales letter and simply spammy.  Normally when I come across such web site, I will simply leave and go elsewhere.

I once asked an Internet guru who is himself using an one-page web site to sell his training course.  He answered that on such web site, visitors have no link to click away and so must stay on and focus on the web site to read the rest.  Whereas visitors to a web site with multiple pages will be tempted to click around.

I reason that perhaps on an one-page web site, the visitors will be forced to follow the desired sales process by the seller, whereas this may not happen on a web site with multiple pages.

On regard to whether it’s spammy, the Internet guru said that if the web site is owned by your father or your trusted friend, surely you will not go away.  So the challenge is to build trust.

And what do you think of an one-page web site?

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I was in an MBA class when the lecturer asked us 1 + 1 = ?

She asked us to raise our hands if we thought it’s 2.  To my surprise, half the class raised their hands.  When asked who thought it’s more than 2, only a few hands were up!

Of course it was not a maths class.  It’s a business class.  I wonder whether the power of synergy has been undermined by many people.  What two people can do together is more than the sum of what they can do individually.

Consider two colleagues who work on separate parts of the same proposal for a client.  Each can come up with his or her own recommendation.  But if they can work together and cross-check each other’s work, they can come up with better proposal for the client than if they produce it individually.

The same goes to individual students who prepare for exam.  Instead of striving on their own, they can group together and discuss issues, questions and case studies, so that the new ideas generated are more than what they can come up with individually.

As for me, I can’t make a baby myself.  Neither can my life partner make it herself.  Nor can we make it individually, no matter how hard we try.  We need to do it together!

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I am privileged to have an existing customer happily hosting one of their web sites with me.  Recently the boss told his staff to transfer all their domain names and hosting under me.

However, the other hosting provider, actually their outsource web developer, would not budge.  He claimed the web sites make use of certain ASP.NET components not normally available on other servers.

Fair enough.  I asked for a list of ASP.NET components required.  Perhaps they really need to stay with him.  But after checking the list, those are just standard components supported on most if not all servers.

Finally, the web developer agreed to let customer go, but not without a “transfer fee” charged for the trouble to transfer their web sites and email accounts to the new server (which I would help do for customer free of charge if given all necessary server login details).

However, after some consideration, the customer decided not to pay the “transfer fee”, not because of money, but because of principle.  Maybe.  But I suspect another reason being the fact that their web sites are under the control of the developer.  They have to rely on the web developer to access and update their web sites.

After all, the web developer has been doing a good job maintaining their web sites.  From customer’s point of view, why switch to me if there is not much compelling reason to switch over to me?  But from my point of view, it is another typical case of customer web sites and hosting being hijacked by provider.

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