A website, unlike regular advertising and communication tools, has an unlimited scope of attracting attention. The choice of the designs and content incorporated depends primarily on the target audience, purpose and requirement. It is not advisable to incorporate animation just because it is attractive, rather it should enhance the already available features and content. A thorough analysis of other methods of inducing interest must be thought of before thinking of animations. One has to decide on the value addition that an animation can give to the site. If it proves to be a distraction and takes away attention from the actual content it may be worth skipping.

Animation includes simple features like moving text, to complex ones like moving caricatures and cartoons. Addition of appropriate animations greatly enhances user interest usability and popularity of a website. A marquee at the top and bottom of a news website, which shows a latest updates available is more user friendly compared to tabs which show their content only after they are clicked. In a maze of information, the user’s attention is directed to the matter of utmost importance in the shortest possible time.

Flash is a common tool used for developing animation graphics for websites. Compared to a site displaying plain text, the presence of animated graphics is more appealing. Some websites have a animation display as soon as a user enters the site. The user is prompted to either wait for it to complete or skip the show entirely. Such displays present the purpose and focus of activity right at the beginning. Moving caricatures and text phrases linked to other independent web pages is a wonderful way of structuring huge volumes of information while at the same time greatly reducing the load time of the home page.

Animation gives a sense of live interaction and instant response to the user. Generally they are of two types, frame and sprite animation. Frame animation consists of that done within a specified area like a rectangle. Here a series of fixed frames are made to run at a fast pace, creating an illusion of a picture in motion. The limitation of this method is that the entire frame is visible, is independent of other parts of the site and is not interactive.

In the sprite form, there is no restrictive frame as such and the picture moves all across the site page. The use of such animations is more common on websites for online games. The various images are linked to program scripts that pre-written. As the user clinks on to the images the appropriate programs run and show the respective animated effect. This leads to other graphic images that prompt the user to choose movements out of a range of options.

Initially animation was considered as the pure use of images or photographs manipulated using tools to create motion. In the fast developing digital world, the development in video effects has lead to linkups between video and graphic animations. This explains how for example the caricature of a political figure is used along with video clips to deliver a strong message compared to plain text. Thus the right use of animations will be an added attraction rather being the sole one.

Peter Brittain
Perth Web Design