Parallax websites are scrolling sites designed to heighten and intensify the user’s onsite interactive experience. Designers of these updated websites with advanced functionality are seen as the latest pioneers in the exploration of the user’s experience in cyberspace. The word “parallax” originated from the visual experience of 2D video games with side scrolling that made use of varied image motion rates in the background, which resulted in the perception of illusory depth during the course of the game. This illusion was created by having the game’s background move at a lesser rate of speed than the foreground, making the background recess into space and appear to be at a greater distance away than the foreground. In a similar way, the design of a Parallax website enables the site’s background to move at a different rate of speed than the remainder of the webpage, creating an intriguing visual sensibility that encourages endless, ingenious applications for advanced online storytelling activity.
Advantages Offered to Internet Users by Parallax Websites
The Parallax mode of design creates sites that offer users such benefits as the following:
• Experiencing Active Page Depth and Animation. – Because of the varied depth perception and constant animation presented to site users, each viewer becomes an active web page visitor and participant. Site visitors sense that they are gaining direct connection with the depth movement and the animation’s activity. No one can remain an idle, somewhat aloof or distant viewer of a Parallax design website. Once you arrive on this website, you become a captive and enthralled audience member and active participant simultaneously, remaining in this dual state until your exit from the site.
• Following a Storytelling Guide through the Parallax Site. – The strongly woven and emphasized theme of a Parallax website compels site visitors to follow a storytelling guide through the entire site. This innovative narrative serves as a relentless, positive tease to keep each visitor transfixed on this kinetic plane of ever-shifting depth realities until he or she has experienced the whole website’s visual terrain. Visitors tend to linger, spending additional time on the pages of a domain with the Parallax style of design, as though they cannot absorb enough of this magnetic presentation that strongly attracts and captures them with its advanced and transformational ratios of shifting perspectives.
• Accepting the Opportunity to Scroll Down Amidst the Entire Web Page. – Once on a Parallax site, no one can resist the enticing opportunity to scroll down and enter (seemingly, physically) into the entire website of content in motion. Visitors feel the pull and push of the scrolling motion, guiding them to delve into every aspect of each page’s structure and character.
• Feeling Strong Curiosity and a Powerful Call to Action. – The visitor’s vivid curiosity about this unique site design and its constant scrolling motion along with the action of each interactive feature make it impossible to dismiss the movement and message of the site content in motion. Due to the strong multi-directional pull from the powerful ebb and flow of directives, each website visitor experiences the very core of a dynamic call to action, as though he or she had already acted on the call.
• Experiencing Site Credibility through Interactive Site Visits. – The enthralling interactive features of a Parallax site render these websites undeniably credible and trustworthy to each visitor. There is a direct honesty connected to this alignment of depth and directional movement taking place simultaneously on these intriguing web pages with such high energy activity and involvement for all.
