Storytelling has long been a cornerstone of human communication since the dawn of communication itself. It allows us to share experiences for the purposes of education and entertainment, but more importantly, it allows us to form an emotional connection around a certain idea. This makes storytelling one of the single most effective ways to communicate the ideas and personality of a brand to users, and the layout of your website can have more of an impact on your story than you might think. A good brand identity should exude from every aspect of a company, but the story often starts with the website.
In fact, 81 percent of consumers will research a company online before going to the store. There’s many different ways to tell your client’s story on their website, but my favorite technique is the use of parallax.
Even if you haven’t heard of parallax web design before, you’ve probably seen it in action. It’s grown pretty popular amongst web designers, and it really hit the mainstream when websites like Snow Fall from the New York Times and Nasa: Prospect used parallax to convey their stories.
The technique gives the illusion of a three-dimensional experience by making the background image move slower than the foreground when scrolling. The result is a sense of page depth and animation that engages the user in a way that two-dimensional websites can’t.
The movement is smooth and seamless, and the visitor tends to stay on the site longer because it encourages them to scroll through the entire page. This creates the perfect medium to tell the story of your client’s business and engage their customers. As you start your parallax build, here are five tips to consider along the way.
- Establish the Story
This may seem like a given, but so many people end up skipping this step. If your client already has their story, all you have to do is ask. But if not, a little leg work with your client might be required. There’s no specific formula for crafting a brand’s story, but it should be creative and true to the brand as a whole. What’s their mission? What obstacles have they overcome? What are the company’s values? How do they change people’s lives? Answering these types of questions, while also fitting in your client’s personality, will draw people into their business before they even give its products or services a hard look.
- Be Consistent
Your client’s story should reverberate throughout their company—especially their website. The build and design of their brand should be reflective of their story. It should be consistent throughout their design, content, product, service, etc. Sticking to the same aesthetic with the website will make the strength of their brand that much greater.
- Use Calls-to-Action
Parallax design, by nature, captivates visitor’s attention, so why not use it to your advantage? If the visitor is taking time to scroll through your client’s parallax site to learn about their story, they’re likely interested in learning about their products or services as well. Capitalizing on the emotional connection visitors make with your client’s brand will help boost their conversion, so strategically placed CTAs are key when building a parallax site.
- Use Different Forms of Media
People don’t tend to stick around on websites with large walls of text. While the copy of your client’s story is certainly a vital component, you can also tell their story with images and videos as well. Mixing up the way you deliver your client’s story will keep it fresh and engaging for their visitors.
- Keep It Relatively Short
There’s a potential pitfall with parallax design, which also happens to be one of its biggest benefits. Parallax is great for user engagement, but it can take a while to load if there is a ton of content. If it takes too long for a site to show up on a user’s device, visitors will navigate away before they even have the opportunity to give your client’s story—or product—a chance.
Another double-edged sword in the world of parallax web design is its tendency to favor length on a single web page. There’s beauty in brevity—if the site feels like an endless scroll, it might discourage people from getting the full story, so keep it simple. Nobody wants to scroll for 5 miles to find the information they’re looking for.
Parallax with CreateMyMobile
What we do are Parallax Site’s design. With CreateMyMobile responsive website builder (which all our clients have access to, for updating their site as they wish), we have plenty of parallax design ideas to help get you started. We’ve spent a lot of time looking at some of the best parallax sites across the web, and we have been able to develop a lot ideas from those
So share your parallax site creation ideas in the comments below!