This review of Onepager (onepagerapp.com) is a detailed review of Onepager along with its advantages and disadvantages relative to other easy website builders.

As the name suggests, Onepager is all about building a single page website easily without the need of any technical skills. Onepager stands true to its goal. Small business owners can easily create trendy and elegant single page website in less than half hour. The website building interface is super easy and is really a breeze for small business owners who do not need a whole lot of functionality. Updating the site is as easy as building the site. Onepager is a good fit for some one looking for web presence to display the store hours, location, contact information and a few lines describing the business.

Here is the best part of Onepager. It’s almost impossible to create a boring site with Onepager. You just can’t go wrong with it. It does not require any design skills or technical coding skills. The elements are few and you just enable whichever you want.

Having said that, if your requirement needs any functionality more than what Onepager offers, or if you ever need more than one page, then Onepager is not for you.

Here is a typical example of a one page site: A show or event like one of our movie screening. We used Weebly to build the site http://oosaravelli.weebly.com/. To give a relative comparison we built a similar site with Onepager http://onepagerapp.com/lo70. Creating the site with Onepager is much quicker. It is also extremely easy to switch the style, change the background colors, layouts etc with Onepager.

The Onepager’s site editor has a stylizer at the bottom of the screen (below the preview) and has four tabs: Content, Theme, Style and Layout.

The Content Tab

Every site automatically gets Site Title / Logo area and the Text area to provide description by default. In addition, a user has a choice to add any information element from the content tab. You can enable/disable the elements from Content tab by simply clicking on the elements (Photos, Services, Download, Newsletter Signup, Hours, Contact, Social). The elements automatically show up in the site at a pre-defined area with corresponding fields for a user to fill in.

The Theme Tab

The Theme Tab presents various pre-defined themes that a user can select for the site. Each theme has a pre-defined background, foreground, font style, text colour etc. To switch a theme, simply click on a theme and all the content is automatically set to the new theme.

The Style Tab

The Style Tab gives a user the option to pick and choose specific colours, font styles and sizes for different sections of the site. You can enter a Hex value of color for Page Background, Content Backgournd and also upload an image for the Page Background. Once the image is uploaded, you have a choice to tile the image or center it, or auto adjust it to screen size.

The Layout Tab

The Layout Tab defines two important aspects of how the content is presented. The Alignment defines if the content should be left justified, centered, or right justified. For One Page Sites, this makes the site look trendy when combined with the correct background image. The Structure specifies if the content should be presented in a narrow column or wide column or in a two column lay out. You can always switch them on the fly.

The Dashboard

The Dashboard has details about site statistics like number of visitors to the site, email subscription sign ups for new letters. However, this is available only to paid users.

Pricing

The pricing is basically in two flavours:

1. Free: Free users do not get access to Dashboard. Also, Free users do not have a choice of using a custom domain name for the site. Onepager does not even allow a vanity subdomain name for Free users. Free users are automatically assigned a cryptic site id like the one for our demo site http://onepagerapp.com/lo70 which is totally non-intuitive and is impossible to remember. Free users are also blocked from viewing the list of Newsletters Signups.
2. $10/month: The other choice is to use a paid service which costs $10 per month and users can pick a name as a onepager extentsion or purchase a custom domain at an additional $15/year or configure a domain bought else where. Paid users also get to view the Newsletter Signups and send Newsletters to their subscribers.

The Pricing of Onepager is out of line. There are providers like Weebly, Yola who offer 10 or 25 sites for $60 a year while Onepager charges $120 a year for one website. For $20 a month, SiteKreator offers a total small business package including mail marketing, Automatic Facebook Tab generation and content syncing along with awesome themes with switcher and also provide live chat support. Onepager’s pricing is certainly very high considering what it has to offer relative to other competitors.

The elements from Content Tab can only be selected once. For Example, you can not use Photos at two different places on the site. Each element can be used only once and the element can not be renamed. “Hours” will say “Hours” and will display all 7 days. You can not change the name to “Timings” and select just one day like we wanted in case of a special event.

Similarly, “Services” will always show up as “Services”. You can not change it to “Products” or “Items”. There is no provision to sell any items. There are some limitations which need to be thought out before choosing Onepager.

For those who use the Free option, you can use custom domain purchased at GoDaddy etc by choosing the “Forward with Masking” option so that your visitors can use a more memorable web site address as opposed to the cryptic “onepagerapp.com/lo70” etc. This however could have an impact on Search Engine Optimization.

The Onepager Site Builder itself works seamlessly across any device. You can edit your site from an iPhone, iPad, Android phone etc. So, if you would like to update information on your site or would like to change theme or other settings, you could do it from the phone itself. It’s a great feature for those who would like to quickly update the site from any where.

However, the finished site itself is not optimized for device. When a visitor comes to your site via a mobile device, the full site is shown on the mobile device making the letters look very small and unreadable. A typical customer of Onepager is some one looking for web presence providing information about store hours, direction etc. A mobile optimized version of the site is highly desirable and is not made available by Onepager, which is a serious limitation. $10 per month is a premium pricing and the lack of mobile optimized site does not justify the pricing at all.

To give you an example of what difference a mobile optimized site would make, lets consider two sites:

1. http://onepagerapp.com/lo70 : Made with Onepager
2. http://www.tomnetwork.ca/oosaravelli.html : Made with Weebly.

If you access the above two sites from a laptop and a mobile phone and compare how they are shown, you will notice that the Weebly site is automatically optimized for mobile devices making it lot more easy to read on a phone. The site made with Onepager is not optimized for mobile devices making it difficult to read the information when accessed from a mobile device.

[Update (Dec, 2011)]: Onepager has new feature to Embed Audio & Video into the pages.