Parallax Effect in Website Design
Parallax effect in websites is a growing requirement in todayâs web pages, it creates a really nice scrolling effect throughout the page giving the user a near 3D experience.
So what exactly is parallax, well technically parallax is the effect of depth of field, if you look at objects between two distances and move your vision of view focusing on the nearest object the furthest object moves at a slower rate of speed giving the parallax effect.
Many newly designed websites are adopting this effect to give the user a new vision to attract their attention and share the website to showcase this new effect creating more visitors to the pages for example the Matthew Wagerfield website which displays the effect brilliantly incorporating the mouse movement over the page to move elements.
Incorporating this in to a webpage can be quite complex with the many elements required to produce an amazing effect, and the use of complex JavaScript, but this has been made a little easier with some fantastic ready written libraries available to freely download such as skrollr.js and scrollmagic.js and of course the JavaScript file Matthew Wagerfield also gives away with excellent tutorials to get you implementing parallax right away.
There are many themes for WordPress emerging with parallax built in as standard to help the non developers create websites with this effect with ease just by adding imagery in to their pages through the admin tool.
Parallax within webpages is commonly triggered by the scrollbar of the webpage, as you scroll through the page, JavaScript calculates the position of the different elements relative to the top of the page adjusting the position of the element at a rate set by parameters using a JavaScript function called scrollTop.
Parallax can also be used to display and hide elements as you scroll through a page making the webpage look infinite, this is a great way to show all your new products on a simple elegant way, making the user scroll more through the page to see what happens next.
In the past most websites use static pages to display content, this is great, but as web designers and developers are constantly looking for new ways to make their websites stand out they were looking for new ways to capture the attention of their visitors, to make them stay longer on their pages, get interested and interact, resulting in more interest in their business and what they have to offer.
If youâre a developer and not entered the world of parallax, then itâs time to give it a go, as mentioned in this article there are many ready made libraries to get you started, or if youâre confident enough have a go at writing your own scripts, sometimes your ideas are quite unique therefore your own scripts may work better.
If you know of any better scripts out there please share in the comments below, we are always happy to look at new ways of implementing this type of effect in to our projects.
