Scrolling Website Design

Website Design – Sites That Scroll Part 1

Website design often features long or infinite scrolling layouts these days. And it’s understandable to want to use it for your website, as it does offer a lot of advantages for you and your visitors.

First of all, it’s a great way to entice visitors to spend more time on your website. It’s also easy for them to get as much info as they need since all they have to do is scroll down instead of having to navigate using the menu.

For you, as the webmaster, it offers some benefits too. You can control the sequence of the items that your readers see, which in turn, makes it easy for you to tell a story.

Here are some SOPs to keep in mind if you want infinite scrolling in your website design.

  • Eye-catching content. Make sure you offer something on your website design page that actually interests your intended readers. This starts with the first things they see on the screen. It should be exceptional, so that the reader will want to scroll down for more.
  • Use imagery. Unless you’re devoting your website to fiction stories, you need to keep things interesting by using images. Animation is also great. You can have the GIFs moving as it’s shown on the screen.

You can even use imagery for fan fiction website design too. That makes the story even more enthralling for your readers. It definitely beats endless blocks of text.

  • See if the parallax effect works for your website design. The parallax effect involves having foreground items scrolling faster than the objects and images in the background. This provides a 3D effect which adds depth to the website design.

This 3D effect makes for a more immersive “you’re there” experience for your website visitors. You just need to use it sparingly, since it can be too overwhelming when you use it for everything.

  • Make sure the readers know that there’s more at the bottom. You can always do this directly by designing an arrow pointing off-screen to indicate the location of additional content. Or you can just display the words “scroll down”.
  • Don’t give the impression of the “false bottom”. That’s when you show your content on the screen and many readers think that that’s it. It’s as if the end of the content is the end of the page.
  • Show visual feedback when you’re loading new content. This is crucial when it takes more than a few seconds for the content to load. You can show a looping animation so that your readers don’t think that the page has stopped working.

So don’t just design three items on a vertical arrangement on the screen, if you have a forth and additional items on the infinite scrolling page. Instead, show part of the forth item on the bottom of the screen so that every reader knows that there’s more.

But what about navigation? We will tackle that issue on the next part of this website design article.

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