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Hey there and welcome back to our series, The Best Stuff on the Web, in which we break out our plumber's tools, make sure our belts are nice and tight, and inspect that series of tubes we call the internet to find the greatest stuff (best websites, most innovative designs, coolest features, most mind-blowing [insert awesome thing here], etc.) we've seen this year.  While our last entry celebrated the second coming of the zoetrope vis-à-vis the recent web trend of parallax scrolling, this time around we're looking at parallax scrolling's spiritual companion: the supertall, single page website.

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To anyone even remotely paying attention as they journey the web, the tropes  and bludgeoningly repetitive motifs of the standard website should offer no surprise: homepage, main menu, interior page, blah blah blah.  Yawn.  After having seen myriad pages use the same layout, design metaphor, and organization, we're fairly confident that though the general public may appreciate the consistent, familiar nature each new website brings, there are very few experiences to be had that are actually interesting.

A lot of this likely stems from the SEO explosion that happened over the last decade.  In a (merciful) response to the single-page Flash "experiences" of the 90's, Google worked with the web community to establish an evolved way of thinking of content on the web: create deep, content-rich, keyword-targeted, Flash-less experiences across numerous pages and expand your potential to capture search traffic.  And so, as Google's stock price climbed higher and higher into the sky, so too did the average number of pages of the modern website.

Truth be told, we can all probably agree it was nice getting from a Google search to the hours of operation page for our local coffee shop, the menu page of our local sandwich joint, or the history page for that famous pastry place we'd heard about (noticing a trend there?  Psh, we know you're a foodie too).  But all-too-quickly, "helpful, content-specific page" theory turned into "create as many pages as you can muster" theory, and websites, not to mention our web searches, became cluttered by needlessly complicated structures, half-baked content, and a hell of a lot of white noise.  To those keeping score: more in fact is sometimes less.

Enter the supertall, single page site.  Imagine a website with every page of content crammed onto a single page.  No dropdown menus.  No sub-pages.  Just a unified, one-and-done experience that breaks the confines of the traditional "page" paradigm.  Think that sounds crazy?  We think it's bloody brilliant.  Why?  One word: the-death-of-the-click (okay, that wasn't one word but sue us - we hate clicking just to get a bit of content and you should too).  That said, here are some examples of excellent supertall sites from our collective recent memory:

Skittles

Widely known for their trippy ad campaigns, Skittles is one of the modern kings of breaking the marketing mold.  A few years ago, the Skittles website featured not a homepage, but distinct widgets featuring content from Facebook, Wikipedia, YouTube, etc. that would pop up and vie for your attention.  Pretty cool if you ask us, so it should come as no surprise that their latest website similarly breaks the mold in the latest (albeit less groundbreaking) trendy fashion.

Featuring bold fonts, a sickeningly sweet rainbow palate, aggressive messaging, and Skittles' famous brand of off-the-wall nonsequiturisms, the Skittles website does the supertall site right, with little to no clicking required, a seemingly bottomless stream of user-generated content through social channels like Twitter and YouTube featured as the site's content (not an afterthought), and even the boring legal stuff tossed in for good measure (via an all-too adorable bowtie hover in the lower-right).  Truthfully, we'd be remiss if we said a candy website deserved a deep, complex sitemap to market their product (is there really that much to say about colored sugar orbs?).  But it seems like Skittles is a proud believer that the less you have to say, the louder it should be. Skittles: lowbrow never seemed so classy!

G'nosh

Who said party dip had to be boring?  Rather than leverage the passe landing page/interior page style used by seemingly every other CPG, G'nosh, the UK-based brand of gourmet dips and spreads, went loud with their page design that would normally, had it been confined to traditional spaces, break the page.

Large imagery, even larger, skewed type, and fake out elements make a bold statement that this brand is anything but blah.  Think that menu at the top will take you to a new page?  Wrong - it's an anchor list for the page!  Think anchor hashtags have to appear post-click?  Womp womp.  Think that block of text in the middle of the page is just there to fill some white space?  Nah, it's a hover-activated recipe filter.

Expectations be damned, G'nosh proudly makes the statement that their site, much like their dips, can't be bound by traditional viewpoints.  Nothing embodies the supertall page ideology better, we'd say.

Bonus Points

You can likely imagine that, given supertall sites quickly becoming something of a trend, there are countless other examples to be found across the web.  Another example worth a mention?  Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest (and likely some new fangled social media hub you've never heard of yet) and their use of lazy loading: it's supertall in sheep's clothing!

We've had a wonderful two days at the Power of eMarketing conference in Providence, Rhode Island. Digital Marketing Manager Christina Inge spoke on two panels, on email content strategy and social media content, as well as moderating an email strategies panel. Technical Project Manager Stephanie Krol sat in on sessions on everything from CMS technology to social platforms. We've met so many interesting, and found all digital marketers share a common set of goals and challenges: getting their company's message out on a growing range of platforms, efficiently and effectively. All told, it was a great two days of sharing high-level marketing and messaging strategies with digital marketing directors and CMOs from around the world.

And our legenday tote bags flew off the table. 

In blog posts over the past month, Jason Smith has explored the concept of the engagement trajectory, the path that consumers take as they engage more with a brand. Starting out with low-level interactions, such as following on Twitter, interested consumers move along the trajectory until a percentage initiate a two-way conversation with a brand by registering on a social channel. This is the gold standard for marketers: starting the conversation with a customer, rather than simply broadcasting to them.
The key to starting that conversation is understanding the three top barriers that make customers hesitate before joining your community:

Time:

The Barrier: Consumers have limited time to engage with brands, and let’s face it, busy people don’t want to hang out online chatting about shirts.
How to Overcome It: Offer content on your website that is a good use of your customers’ time. Save them time by offering practical advice, important news, and valuable discounts. Structure your site so that information is easy to access—good information architecture is important.

Privacy: 

The Barrier: Increasing media scrutiny of targeted marketing practices and web analytics have made customers wary of providing companies with any information, based on the perception that companies know everything about the consumer and that targeting will be intrusive.
How to Overcome It: Educate the public on the real nature of the data most marketers collect, the uses we put it to, and the non-intrusive nature of most targeting. Create a clear, no-jargon privacy policy. Actively “push” that policy out through email, as well as having it as a link on your site.

Over-Commitment:

The Barrier: People are already registered for more social media services than they use. The abandonment rate for Twitter accounts is 80%; people have enough to do to keep up with the mainstream channels, let alone joining a niche channel devoted to a commercial enterprise.
How to Overcome It: Make interactions with your site simple: limit the number of questions in signup forms and use progressive profiling to gather more information from more engaged consumers over time. Use some push marketing, with members’ permission, to keep momentum going once people join. Groups within the community are a great way to segment audience interests; use group membership data to deliver targeted messages like email newsletters, special offers, and live events. Always have something new going on to give members reasons to visit your community. In the early stages, it will be up to community managers to provide that fresh content.

There's nothing more rewarding or productive than the two-way conversations that so many brands are now having with their customers. Getting customers to interact with your brand is not hard; they want to share with you. Making it obvious that your community is a place where that sharing becomes easier is the challenge. Overcoming the barriers that keep them from joining your branded community can pave the way for better, more effective marketing and customer relationships.