Home Page Animation – Just Say No

by JO MARSICANO

An emerging, but disturbing, trend
More and more, organizations are using animation on their home page. Often it’s a series of rotating photographs supported by other design elements. The animation is beautiful, creative and technically outstanding. But animation wastes premium screen space. On a page that should trumpet the brand promise and deliver users real content in return for their attention, animation fails.

Check out Weber Shandwick’s home page. The quality of this animation is so good, it startled me when I first saw it. High resolution, clean definition between graphic elements, sophisticated depth of field. But what does the animation actually promote? What does it communicate? What does it sell? To me, it says the company can accomplish a fancy gimmick on its site, but says nothing about what the firm is in business for.

The eye immediately goes to the moving images—but so what? Drawing this kind of attention is an empty exercise and unfortunately has become increasingly common on home pages. And most rotating images that also have text switch so quickly you can't finish reading before a new photo appears.

Triangle Park Creative, a Twin Cities web and print development firm, has created a Web Quality Checklist, a useful rundown of important qualities all websites should have.

One of the checklist questions is:

“Does the design have a good balance between harmony and contrast (space vs. active elements; large vs. small; bold vs. subtle)? For example, does the visitor’s eye know where to look first? Second?” (emphasis mine)

Here’s another example of animation. What is the return on our “attention investment?” People visit websites for mere minutes, sometimes just seconds. Can we afford to draw their eye away from the most essential information about our organization? And even if users do get some marginal entertainment value out of it, does their experience translate into an actual response?

Blocking good SEO
Dave Currence of the search engine optimization consulting firm Catwired, said this in his SEO course for professionals: “Your home page gets the highest priority in search engine rankings so make sure your key search phrases are on your home page.” (emphasis mine).

Animation displaces text, leaving fewer options for SEO-optimizing the page. And since Flash (a common software for producing videos and animation) is difficult for search engines to read, not only are we distracting our users with animation, we’re making it harder for them to find our sites in the first place.

The home page must display the most SEO-friendly content of the entire site, since search engines prioritize those pages. Why would we put non-SEO friendly content on our home page when we could replace it with a juicy well-written HTML Heading 1 (a draw for search engines) that trumpets the organization's value by incorporating the key search terms people will use to find us?

Not all trends are created equal
In The Six Steps to Building a Digital Brand, we’re cautioned against equating a trend to good business. The article states, “Some agencies believe they can develop a forward-thinking digital reputation by telling clients about the latest trend rather than what makes sense for a particular brand…. too often…strategy gets lost in the pursuit of the trend of the day.” (emphasis mine)

Animation is improving in visual quality and technical sophistication. It’s emerging as the norm on home pages. But popularity does not equal substance (think Twinkies and Die Hard movies. But I digress).

The fact that something is a trend is an inadequate reason to use it. It has to make sense from a business perspective.

Good home pages without animation
Brain Traffic simply states what it does, boldly and clearly on the home page. It claims the home page for its central brand promise and even leaves plenty of white space around it. Refreshing.

Minnesota Charities Review Council quickly tells us what the organization does and how to learn more or donate. It has a pleasing design and uses just enough words to describe itself without overdoing it. It’s almost soothing.

Clockwork Active Media Systems has a funky, understated look and feel. It’s inviting. I don’t have to work hard to find out who they are and what they do. Nothing to distract me.

I had to really hunt to find these examples, because I was looking for home pages that didn't use animation but were also good in other respects. All three home pages have modern designs, including fonts, colors, and navigation. They achieve their goal nicely without putting moving pictures in my way.

Well designed home pages that clearly drive home a brand promise should be the goal. Animation with no good business objective or return to the user (see Kristina Halvorson’s Content Strategy for the Web) is a waste.

There are good uses of animation. A short video of a compelling interview with a relevant newsmaker and instructional tutorials are two good examples. But these tools, by and large, belong somewhere other than the home page.

Do you have animation on your home page? If so, you might want to consider whether it's paying the rent for such valuable screen real estate.

Upcoming post: Persuading the older "I don't want any dynamic content" generation to re-think its position