Hashbang and the One Page Website

The American blog network Gawker Media (Gizmodo, Kotaku, Lifehacker…) launched a bold re-design of its websites last week. Gone is the fairly standard news/blog style website and in its place a single page website that loads articles without requiring the web browser to completely re-load a new page: us.gawker.com.

The redesign has not rolled out to all versions of its other sites with the UK and Canadian versions still displaying the old design.

The redesign has caused a lot of discussion both on the design itself and technical implications with creating a website in this manner.

It centres on the #! part of the URLs http://gawker.com/#!5759634/china-becomes-worlds-second-largest-economy – the ‘hashbang’. Twitter and Facebook have also started using them recently.

One of the problems with loading content without completely loading a new page, using a technique like ajax, is that traditionally search crawlers like the Googlebot would not be able to load and index the content. Google has since published a guide on how to make pages that load in this way available to be crawled. The crawler swaps the hashbang part of the URL with ?_escaped_fragment_= http://gizmodo.com/?_escaped_fragment_=5759634/china-becomes-worlds-second-largest-economy

The hashbang approach has received both negative criticism and more measured discussion on the reasons for resorting to this. This is due to the fact that the URL does not actually point to the true location of the article and requires JavaScript once you reach the website to then load in the correct content.

Regardless of the technical pros and cons, a difficulty for websites like Twitter and Gawker is to change users’ expectations for these types of websites. Few people have complained, with Google Maps and Gmail working without requiring full page reloads but, for text content websites that contain articles and information, adopting this approach seems to have agitated a large number of users.