Multi-page site for predominantly static pages?

Question

I am currently designing a website for a business. This website will have dynamic areas - such as an "admin" area in the future. But for now, there are going to be 14-16 static pages. Testimonials, products and services, typical corporate pages.

I really like the idea of loading html dynamically with backbone and doT.js. But for this purpose, am I better-served with a multiple-page approach? I've read that single-page designs can harm SEO but wasn't sure if that was still accurate. That is of major consideration for a basically fully static site where content is king.

Is SO a single-page site?

I am using apache2 with PHP/symfony2 for my current multi-page implementation for all of the static pages (and caching them).

Answer 1

It sounds like your site would be better off as static as possible. There's a lot of upside:

1. It should load quickly, because there's no processing to do, fewer files to load, and once it's sent to the browser you don't have to wait for the JavaScript to run before the page shows.
2. It will be more widely supported. Everything supports HTML; if your page loads require JavaScript, you might be cutting people off and never realise it.
3. Search engines will have a much easier time indexing static sites.
4. It's easier to develop and maintain a simple static site.
5. It's a lot harder to break. If your page loads require JavaScript and you accidentally deploy a broken script, you run the risk of completely blank pages. In a static site, chances are the text will still show.

Things like Backbone and JS templating are great when you're dealing with dynamic data. Backbone comes in to its own when you have objects that you're showing on a page, and want to build a complex interface to interact with them. But that doesn't sound like your page here. Similarly, JS templating is great if you're sending data to the page, maybe from an AJAX request, and want to render it client-side. But it doesn't sound like that's the case for this project.

In general, try to do the simplest thing that will work. Building the site as a static page will be a good starting point, and if you want to add JavaScript to it later you can build on that foundation.