Web designing has gone through a sea-change in the last few years with even the average user becoming a lot pickier than the way s/he was in the past.
From improved page speed to minimalistic designs, to improved user experience, everything is now playing a massive role in making all the differences in the designing world, either for better or worse.
Therefore, in order to capture maximum attention, web designers have come up with a brand new set of visualization to attract more relevant traffic to their website. One of the very same tricks is known as parallax scrolling. Here’s what Palmetto, a Columbia web design company wants you to know about parallax scrolling.
Parallax Scrolling: A Brief Overview
Asymmetrical scrolling, also known as parallax scrolling, is a technique e-commerce websites use where the background images move slower than the ones in front thereby, creating a three-dimensional experience of depth in the process.
The parallax scrolling technique was invented in 2011 through the combination of HTML5 and CSS3.
How to Navigate A Parallax Website
While conventional sites come with more than one pages, a parallax website typically organized every element nicely on a single page.
The website can be navigated by scrolling down the page or by clicking on the distributed links throughout the site.
Why is Parallax Scrolling Awesome?
The parallax scrolling effect is considered successful in almost every sphere of web designing especially because it’s capable of making the site look modern, creative, and most importantly, cool.
Other than that, it also comes with several business benefits. Here, have a look.
- Increase in engagement
Parallax scrolling has the potential of engaging user(s) from the offset.
As soon as you’d land yourself on a parallax scrolling website, you’d immediately be enthralled by the hypnotic effect of the feature. A few tweaks here and there may even give you the impression that you’re traveling through space and time.
This entire experience is so gratifying and compelling that you will spend some more of your time on the website, which in this world, is a vital aspect for any site to have.
- Improved user experience
The parallax scrolling effect can liven up any website coming with a lot of information.
It can freshen and enrich the appearance of a flat page, making it catchy and memorable from the point of view of the audience.
- Telling a story
Parallax scrolling is similar to that of telling a story by using text and photographs complementing each other during the process.
As a visitor, you’ll be allowed to take control of the entire story, walking through the whole thing at your own pace.
Best Practices of Parallax Designing
Parallax design primarily starts with the implementation of dynamic effects. Unfortunately you simply can’t get animation to work in older browsers that do not support newer techniques.
For example, if a person is viewing the site using Internet Explorer 8- the body of the page will scroll but images won’t move at all, making this type of design hard to read. With other HTML frameworks such as Bootstrap 4 has used [enter-key/touch] libraries which automatically detect outdated browser displays within just seconds and makes sure that graphics do not pop up during scrolling.
So when designing with dynamic functions it’s always good to keep tabs on how browser speed affects your product while coding optimization strategies to catch errors before they happen. It may seem tedious but trust me- there will be plenty of time afterwards where you’ll only wish someone had checked those last two spaces before publishing!
And don’t just do parallax design for the sake of it.
Is there a particular reason for the page to be be animated? Should you also animate the graphics or typography on the page? Parallax scrolling goes from cute and fun to overcomplicated with just a few additions. Complicated can work if the content is still digestible. But too complicated is bad.
Notable mentions
- The parallax effect helps to create encouragement and curiosity in the audience convincing them to take the leap of faith as soon as possible.
- It also helps in boosting the credibility of the webpage.
So that more or less sums up the article. We hope you had a good and enlightening read.