Animated effects are a great way to draw attention to areas of your site, but they must have a purpose. To simply litter your pages with lots of movement can easily distract site visitors from seeing your key message. Here are a couple of examples of how animations could be used:
This is a simple animated photo gallery. Its a great way to display lots of pictures to your site visitors without forcing them to scroll and click lots of thumbnails images.
We’ve used a similar gallery on our site banner to show different web site design possibilities.
Galleries such as this are designed to be seen and watched, and should, therefore, give emphasis to your site message.
This is a simple Flash Ad. Typically the use of ads like this is designed to draw attention to an advertiser who may be using yours site as part of a web site marketing program. Also, you could create ads for your site and have them appear on other web sites.
These types of ads should be used sparingly, as they can force people away from your site.
Note: By moving a mouse pointer over the above image, site visitors can take control
over the display of pictures with a pop-
Other factors to consider when specifying Flash Animations is the size of the files.
If they are too large, your web site visitors may just give up waiting for the animation
to load and go elsewhere. If you place too much animation on a single web page, it
could make your page uncomfortable and confusing to read easily. This may well tire
your site visitors. The general rule of thumb is to only use animation to emphasise
some important part of your site message, and NEVER place animated ads for other
sites on your home page -