Website visual effects

It is a common knowledge that visual support help to memorize almost every sort of information much better. The use of various graphic images for illustrating website content makes website content and the site in general remain in the visitor's memory for a long time. However, images are not the only way to make your site easy to memorize. Web developers often use various website visual effects:

• marquee text;
• animated buttons;
• drop-down menus;
• page transition effects;
• sparkling backgrounds etc.

Is the use of such website visual effects on business websites (corporate sites) appropriate? We will try to answer this question in our article devoted to website visual effects.

Let us start with the marquee text. The marquee text makes the information seems fresh and urgent. You may use the marquee text when you don't have enough free space on the site (for one line of text only), and the required amount of information is much bigger than this text line. However, as the movement of the marquee text often distracts or irritates the site visitors, you shouldn't use the marquee text in the web design of your site.

Animated buttons. Different animated menu buttons on websites has become quite popular recently. When the user hovers the mouse cursor over such buttons or click of them, they change their color, move from side to side or up and down. However, these animated buttons have almost no functional benefit for the site, on the contrary, they give web developer or website owner a lot of trouble. If the site visitor has disabled graphic images or client-side scripts in the settings of his web browser, all he will see instead of your undoubtedly nice animated button is an empty square.

Drop-down menu. The use of the drop-down menu effect is very often conditioned by restricted empty space on a large website. In such case a big number of menu items is packed in a compact way. However, the use of drop-down menus in website design has a number of disadvantages: complexity of technical realization, complexity of updates after changing the site structure, increase of the time of site load etc. It is appropriate to use drop-down menus at websites where the titles of the pages are added or changed very rarely.

Page transition effects. Various page transition effects are used quite often, for example, when the user enters or leaves the site or clicks on the navigation link/menu item to visit another site page. There are a lot of variants of page transition effects, namely: dissolve screen, curtain (horizontal or vertical, closing or opening), fade effect, moving stripes, moving boxes etc. Page transition effects are quite easy to realize, but they do not give any additional economic profit. Their use is optional: if the client wants and the developer can – why not?

Sparkling background. Sparkling stars on website background may look appropriate on a website devoted to animation in web design but it is rather an exception from the rule. In all other cases sparkling background makes a very bad influence on website efficiency. Sparkling background tires the visitors' eyes, prevents them from perceiving information, quickly irritates the visitors. As a result they may leave the site. Thus if the use of sparkling background is not justified by economic or another kind of profit you had better do without it.

TAGS
website visual effects, marquee text, animated buttons, drop-down menu, page transition effects, sparkling background, web design