Animation in Web Design

Loveland, Fort Collins, Colorado

Most high-end websites today contain some sort of movement on the page. It may be video, or more commonly it is probably some mixture of animated graphics and text. Each of these elements of high-end Web design serves to immediately capture the visitor's attention when she lands on the website. Your website needs to do the same thing. Whether your competitors already have animation on their websites or not, you need it to stay competitive. In shopping for Web design service, it is important to ask the Internet marketing company, "Will the website contain animation, and how will it be used?"

If the answer is "no", then your answer to the website design company needs to be "no" too. Animation in Web design has pretty much become standard. If you build a website design without animation, your website will be outdated right out of the box. You need your website to last as long as possible, so do it right the first time. It will likely mean spending a little more on your website, but it is well worth the investment.

Google Analytics, the website traffic statistics program that Concerto Internet Marketing clients have in their websites, shows a website's bounce rate and session length. Both of these measure the visitor's engagement in the website. Bounce rate tells us what percentage of people came to the website and then immediately backed out. Session length tells us how long the average visitor spent on the website.

You have less than 10 seconds to convince a visitor to stay on your website. The animation will capture their attention long enough to pique their curiosity and entice them to read your content.

Animation Pitfalls

There is a wrong way to use animation. 90% of animation is built in a program called Adobe® Flash®. Flash® is really cool and allows you to create some really neat effects. There's just one problem. Google is not yet very good at "spidering" Flash® files, and most Flash® files are not constructed in a search engine-friendly format. For this reason, you do not want to build your entire website in Flash®. Sure, it might look cool, but if no one can find it because Google doesn't care for it, then what's the use?

Another common yet ill-advised use of Flash is to create "splash" or entry pages. The idea behind creating a splash page is that users will "Ooo" and "Aahh" at your fancy animation and will be so impressed that they will think you're the best out there. The plain and simple fact is that no one has patience these days to watch fancy intro animation. They will click the ‘Skip' button immediately or, if you don't have a skip button, they will click back out of your site.

Aside from being relatively useless from a user standpoint, splash pages can also cause search engine optimization headaches. Because your splash page will be the default entry page of your site, it is taking up a valuable piece of real estate in your site. Google and the other search engines view your website's home page as the most important page of your website, and it is responsible for making a good first impression with them. A splash page is made up of a big Flash® image and little if any text. Google could care less about your website design's animation. All it cares about is information, information in the form of text. If the most important page of your website contains ZERO information, it sends a very bad message to the search engines. So if your website contains a splash page, and we decide to work together on your search engine optimization, the first thing that I'm going to tell you is that the splash page has got to go.

Another potentially problematic use of animation is for website navigation. If all of the buttons in your website are contained in a Flash® piece, because Flash® is tough for them to read, Google and the other search engines will have a difficult time finding all of the pages of your site. This issue can be mitigated somewhat by having a website footer navigation that is text-based, which I recommend as a matter of course, whether you have a Flash®-based navigation or not.

The Right Way to Use Animation

Animation should be used as an accent. Most commonly, animation is used in the banner of a website to catch the visitor's eye, and then allow the visitor to move down the page. Animation should always come to a stop at some point. If the banner is constantly moving, it can be distracting to the visitor, and make it difficult for him/her to concentrate on the content of your website that is in the end going to be responsible for him/her deciding to contact you.

Flash® is also a great vehicle for playing video. It is a widely accessible Internet browser extension. According to Adobe®, "Flash content reaches 99% of Internet viewers". So your animation and video will most likely be viewable by the people who come to your website.

If you'd like to talk about your website's existing animation or adding animation to a new website for your business, call or email me today. Animation comes standard with all Concerto Internet Marketing websites.