The Single-Purpose Website

Throughout the past several years, Kanye West’s website has gone through several metamorphoses. Several years ago, his website had a pretty standard setup. In 2007, it was the home of KanyeUniverseCity, a blog any hypebeast will fondly remember. Its 2010 redesign looked awesome, but it was short-lived. (BTW, these links require a bit of patience; Archive.org takes time to load, but is usually reliable.)

Ahhh, the good ole’ days.

Like many marketers today, West started collecting emails when he launched his free GOOD Fridays series, prior to the release of his fifth solo album, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.

The latest iterations of his site are extremely different from what most of us are used to. He doesn’t have a blog and he doesn’t collect any email addresses. Instead of having one site that organizes and accommodates his growing body of work (e.g., his fashion ventures, press coverage, accolades, etc.), he has multiple websites — each of which focuses on one aspect of his work. Each of them are very simple.

A few months ago, his homepage featured his new single with Paul McCartney, titled “Only One.” There was nothing on the page except a YouTube video and images of the lyrics written in handwriting. At the time of writing, his homepage features his latest single and video, “All Day.”

One call to action: Listen to the song.

Because Kanye’s sites are so focused, he naturally has more than one. His fashion site, yeezy.supply, features a countdown (more on this tactic in a sec) and a background video. It was on this site that Kanye built hype for his recent collaboration with Adidas. The fashion show was even live-streamed to theaters.

In an age when each webpage has dozens of calls to action (CTAs — e.g., subscribe here, pre-order this, check out this snippet), single-purpose websites cut through the noise. The audience knows exactly what the artist wants them to do. Users give the action their complete attention, even if just for a few moments.

As many of our sites grow more complex and convoluted, I think we’re going to see more forward-thinking musicians and brands spread their messages and initiatives across several single-purpose sites (different from “microsites”). More than ever, marketers — whether in entertainment, branding, or some other vertical — will segment content to focused audiences (similar to how apps are unbundling features — Facebook decoupling its Messenger app, Path building Kong, etc.). Instead of having one URL point to one static site built on WordPress or another sort of CMS, that URL will point to different, focused, single-purpose webpages with their own domain names. Speaking of URLs…