Today we bring you the latest news in beautiful parallax web design. Although it’s not necessarily new since it has been in use for a couple of years now. But if it were released this year parallax web design would still be all the rage in digital marketing services and website development companies.
Parallax Web Design
The parallax effect itself is quite simple to explain. In essence: it’s based on creating multiple layers within a website moving at different speeds.
As the user scrolls down the screen the objects move at different speeds creating an interactive effect that makes the website appear more dynamic.
The parallax scrolling design became popular in web pages after Nike launched it on their website “Nike Better World” in 2011.
But if the parallax scrolling isn’t done right then it can turn into a mess. You need to ensure that your site’s pages and navigation still make sense to the end user otherwise the beauty of it will be lost and visitors will be confused.
This technique is used mainly for websites and creative landing pages whose design is a single page where it is used to put all the sections in order to have a considerable amount of “scroll down” and apply this effect without it being seen as something forced.
Here are some creative examples of websites that apply parallax scrolling.
For a site with parallax scrolling to work properly we must consider several factors:
Usability
Since you’re essentially loading the entire site at once (because it’s all just one big long page) these sites tend to have a lot of elements to download which might cause the site to load slower.
To solve this problem developers have figured out how to load only the portions of the page that you actually need. As the user scrolls down the elements are loaded in the background so that the user has a smooth scrolling experience.
Analytics
Websites that use a parallax effect are structured on a single page which makes it difficult to perform analytics in terms of visits, most relevant sections, bounce rate, etc.
Images
The parallax effect is also usually combined with responsive design, which means you need pictures with minimum sizes (typically 1900 pixels wide) so that they have good resolution on any screen or device.
However, the larger the picture the slower the site so there needs to be a balance between picture quality and image size. As long as the page isn’t more than 2 MB when fully loaded you should be OK.
On-Page Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Parallax web design is typically terrible for SEO. SEO expects the site to be divided into logical, hierarchical pages and blogs so that search engines can categorize and index it.
But parallax web design essentially looks like one giant page.
Typically a parallax navigation menu uses hash codes to move the page up or down to the appropriate section (e.g., About, Contact, Services). But on a normal website, clicking the navigation bar loads an entirely new page. The later is better for SEO so you will need to make sure you have pages behind the scenes that have all of the content of the sections and make sure those pages are indexed.
Link Building
Another aspect that affects the SEO of the page is in the cast of external links. For optimal strategy of link building, links pointing to a particular URL must be over the different sections of the website in question, providing relevant equitable, and not concentrate on a single page, but within it there are several sections, since that is not recognizable by search engines and therefore not conducive to positioning.
Recommendations
Therefore, what is usually recommended from a digital marketing services agency such as Think BIG Engine in Pittsburgh PA is to create the home page with the parallax effect to provide the most impact for the first impression and then use standard non-parallax designs for the interior pages.
Here’s a video to explain it in more detail: