Add some sparkle to your website
Did you know that, on average, a web user spends 8 seconds on a web page before moving away to the next website?
You therefore have very little time to make an impact on a new visitor.
Obviously having an interesting product or service to sell, presenting it in a well designed, well written and easy to use website will help. But as more and more of your competitors strive to achieve this, you may need to consider something else to differentiate your site from theirs.
Animations may be the way to go. By animations, I am not talking about revolving icons or flashing fluorescent straplines that thankfully are becoming a thing of the past. I am talking about a presentation that delivers your message with images, animations, and possibly sound and video, in a similar way to how a TV commercial would.
There are rules that you absolutely must follow though to make it successful, such as:
- Give visitors the choice of viewing or not viewing your presentation – your presentation should NOT be an ‘intro’ to your website, but should run within your web page and preferably appear once the rest of your page has fully loaded.
- Avoid large amounts of text
- Your presentation should stop once it has completed or if on a permanent loop, slides should transition slowly
- Make it short – 2 reasons for that: first of all, even though fast broadband is now more widely available, animations are still slower to download – don’t make your visitors wait too long for your presentation to show. Secondly, because a presentation generally doesn’t require interaction from the users, they will get bored after a while no matter how good your graphics are.
- Don’t rely on it for keywords. Although search engines such as Google now have some Flash indexing capabilities, these are still limited and you may not achieve optimised searchability if most of your keywords are restricted to a Flash presentation.
But, if you do it well, animations can definitely add that extra sparkle that may make your website stand out from the crowd.
Animation Projects
The Samui Design Website
(www.samui.co.uk)
presenting our services in an animated slide show of images and catch phrases.
The Oxford Technologies Website
Client: Oxford Technologies
(http://www.oxfordtechnologies.co.uk/remote_handling.htm) including an animated and interactive presentation demonstrating applications for Remote Handling.
The Sara Louise Kakes Website
Client: Sara Louise Kakes
(www.saralouisekakes.co.uk)
including a slide-show of mouth-watering photographs of the Sara Louise range of cakes!