I recently came across the ground-breaking (my word, maybe not yours) website for digital agency Modernista, at modernista.com. It’s a pageless concept that utilizes the existing framework of the web to serve it’s information. Want to see their work? They take you to Flickr and YouTube. Want to know about their history? See their page on Wikipedia. Press releases, news? Served up on a Google news feed.
Modernista.com: page-less website awesome-ness
From an experiential and design perspective, there is room for improvement. The navigation device could be more elegant and I’d like to see it move more quickly and have a more persistent location as it moves from site to site, but I’m not here to hate. Frankly, I find this to be a brilliant example of work and an approach that anyone developing a site should explore.
Many of the clients I work with are rebuilding their 3-4 year old sites to better align with current technology. But why? As the modernista site so clearly articulates, there is no reason to invest in infrastructure when you can serve your entire site and experience on the existing backbone of the web. From a UX standpoint, your users are simply finding your content on sites they, probably, already have at least a passing familiarity with.
I like this approach for portal and aggregator sites as well. But in fairness, I think the challenges of maintaining the content might prove to be more challenging than your own content management system, but who knows? Maybe in the long run, at least from an economics perspective, it would pay off to have more effort in content posting and updating than in technology maintenance and infrastructure redevelopment?
