3 website animations to bring your site alive

Website animations, when used intentionally, add life to a website. You’ll be surprised to know that seemingly simple animation techniques such as parallax, motion graphics, CSS3 transitions, etc. do a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to reinforcing your website branding, explaining what your product does, and drawing your visitors’ attention to your key marketing messages.

Website animations do all of this and more while offering friendly nudges to users as they interact with a website.

But website animations aren’t about animating ad hoc elements on a website to fade in or zoom. Animating a website — or creating an animated website — needs a strategy. You need to know your goals with animation — why are you going for an animated website in the first place? That said, three types of website animations always work at boosting branding, engagement, and user experience. Here are what these three website animation effects are and examples of websites that use them just right.

Website animation effects for better website branding

Website animations are an excellent tool for branding. When done right, animations on your website can serve as gentle branding nudges and reinforce your branding as your users engage with the different parts of your website.

Moreover, because animations are difficult to miss, users naturally end up experiencing your branding elements. If static elements are used in place of animations, they can go unnoticed.

Here’s an example of a website that goes all out with animations to emphasize its branding: Available Lights — an animated website project by 2Point:

• First up, you’ve an animated logo that tells you exactly what the brand does — you’ve lights in action, an apt animation for a logo for a lighting business.
• Next, you’ve a branded animated graphic right in the header area that, again, tells you exactly what the business does.
• You also have flashes that highlight the business’s key marketing messages, but in a very branded style!

Website animation effects to show what you do

Website animations are also a great way to explain what you do to your users. A good homepage header area website animation goes well with your key marketing message (or your page’s headline, also called a unique value proposition). It complements your text copy and shows rather than tells what you do. It, of course, offers a more branded website experience too.

Videos can also work well for these kinds of brand communications, but autoplay videos are annoying, and users can choose to NOT play your regular videos. Animations, on the other hand, are always ON. Also, because human sight is designed to follow motion, animations help you hold the attention of your users for a little longer! When you use animation effects in your hero area, you can draw your users’ attention to your primary call to action buttons as well.

Here’s an example of a website with animations explaining what the solution does: Creative Electron — an animated website project by 2Point:

This video: https://www.instagram.com/p/CA–hXrhlFP/

• Notice how the header animation that shows the solution in action and perfectly complements the copy.
• Below that, you have an entire animated section that responds as users engage with it. This section uses animations to highlight the service verticals that the client supports. In general, this is some excellent and natural use of animation for an X-raying solution to show X-rays of elements as users engage with them!

Website animation effects to emphasize your key marketing messages

Users don’t read but skim through your content. If they sense motion as they are scanning your copy, they immediately notice it.

Said another way, since animations catch your users’ attention, you can use them to highlight key pieces of your marketing copy that they must see. It’s for this reason that many websites add sections as slide-ins as people scroll through the pages. Doing so helps them instantly get a user’s attention to their important areas.

Here’s an example of a website using an animation rather subtly to keep users for a little longer on its crucial copy: Nvoli Capital — an animated website project by 2Point:

Website animations also don’t always have to be too complex and try too hard. Even subtle motions can create a good impact, as in this example. It does nothing dramatic, yet, users find themselves re-visiting the copy.

Get a website with custom animations and interactions

As human beings, we’re hardwired to follow motion. Animations on websites tap into this very innate tendency to instantly draw users’ attention to elements you’d like to emphasize. And because website animations are so powerful, you don’t just add an animated transition to scrolling or make a piece of text slide in or get a call to action button to pop up.

You need to know 1) why you’re building an animated website in the first place, 2) what are your goals with website animations, and 3) how each animation you add to your website adds to it.

At 2Point, we specialize in building custom animated websites. We use website animations strategically to make our client’s website channel 10X more effective. Check out some of the custom animated websites we’ve built here. And if you’re interested in creating an animated website for your business, get in touch.