As a company that offers first class web design Surrey, Thunderbolt Digital love nothing more than a well-designed site! We love to see designers and developers pushing the boundaries and creating exciting pages for us to browse, but we know that local businesses need a lot of help in this area. It can be very tempting to budding entrepreneurs to use various special effects on their site, but is this something that would really benefit you? To help you answer this question, our expert team have put together a quick guide to help you decide if special effects are something that you should have on your site or not!
Yes!
Well executed special effects like animations can add flair, and make your site feel more interactive as a result. Careful use of effects can also draw users’ attentions to certain areas that you wish to highlight and also increase engagement, as things that move (either independently or as a hover animation) are more likely to be clicked on. A site that can be looked to for inspiration here is Innocent which includes some really simple but fun hover animations that add that little extra bit of something to the site.
Following on from this, websites that are interesting or even fun to view and explore can leave a good impression on visitors, so long as UX (user experience) isn’t sacrificed in the process; an engaging website that’s hard to navigate will leave people frustrated instead of intrigued!
No!
Special effects certainly can be used well to make a site more impressive, but missing that mark can lead to results that look gaudy and not at all tasteful, which is very rarely the sort of look you want to be going for! Badly implemented animations can look amateurish and things like gifs can appear tacky or make it appear that your company is trying too hard to be ‘cool’.
Special effects can also distract visitors, especially if they are too large or numerous, which can lead to users ignoring content and brand in favour of the fun animations you thought would help! On the flip side of this is autoplay: music or videos with sound that start up by themselves can be terribly irritating to visitors and are likely to drive them away rather than enamour them, so steer clear from this when you can!
The Verdict!
So, should you use special effects in your web design? Well, the answer all depends! If appropriate for your brand and image, then using them sparingly and properly can give you an edge in engagement that you might not see otherwise! However, ‘static’ websites are a perfectly viable option for certain businesses – it all depends on the sort of impression you’re trying to give and the type of audience you want to appeal to.
However, if you are going to use animations on your site, then be sure to avoid Flash, as Google will soon be implementing penalties for this; make sure than any animations are made using HTML5, CSS, or JavaScript.