The best web design tells a story; Examples of web storytelling magic

June 6, 2016

Your website is the digital avatar for your brand, your place in the cocktail party called the internet. Your services, culture, personality, and how you help your clients all need to be described in such a way that your website visitor’s instantaneously know what you’re offering and why your service is unique.

Through a captivating narrative and by clearly defining who you are through the best web design possible, you’re catering to your specific audience and providing them a memorable web experience.

To start with, when creating designs that intrigue, understanding that 93% of buying cycles begin with an online search is pivotal to how you present your business as it implies that much of this traffic is new to your brand. Furthermore, the fact that 40% of people will leave a website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load means that the story you tell through your website absolutely has to be captivating through not only its copy but its design as well.

Proving that research even further, recent studies reveal that you have only .05 seconds from the time your page loads until your users have formed an opinion about your site. Five seconds requires thoughtful website design that captures your audience’s attention and entices them to take a look around.

This is where the role of a web design company comes into play; to tell your story.

Research by Adobe has shown that 2 out of 3 people would rather spend 15 minutes reading something beautifully designed over something plain. Therefore, ensuring that your web design company creates a site that speaks to who you are while also speaking to your customers is integral to the success of your website.

How to tell your story through your website:

• Let your personality shine through
Your brand should have a voice, and that voice should be clearly displayed through your website design. By adopting bold images, colours, and succinct text, you can begin to establish a narrative that describes who your brand is trying to be. Having established these visual branding guidelines early in your design process proves that you’ve invested in your brand image and helps to build trust and recognition through a unified presence — both online and in the real world.

By creating a website that is not only fun to navigate, but creatively captures who you are, allows your users to get a feel for your company values right out of the gate. One great example of a small business with a website full of character is Spokes Pedicabs in the Oak Cliff neighbourhood of Dallas, Texas. By adopting a website that actually guides their users along their routes, the interactivity of the Spokes website act as a guidebook to area visitors.

Best web design company

• Be Human
Your website is a relationship-building tool that defines who you are based on imagery and concepts that your team believes in. But, at its core, it’s about your customers and the value that they’ll receive from your product or service.

Your content should be directly targeted to your audience. Speak how they speak, and make the conversation real. High-tech jargon and ostracizing language takes away from the human connection that your website needs to establish. Your website should connect with your visitors and ignite a feeling through your content and design.

• Your layout should be easy to follow
The true capacity for telling a story comes with the type of design you decide to take. Current trends for some of the best web designs out there include long-scroll homepages and parallax design.

Parallax design is when the background and foreground images move at different speeds to create an illusion of depth. These scroll-focused designs make it the perfect atmosphere for storytelling, and there are numerous examples out there that make storytelling incredibly effective through long scroll layouts.

Thanks to mobile browsing, and some industry greats who are championing the use of parallax scrolling, this is quickly becoming the most popular responsive web design.

Some examples of designs that develop intriguing stories:

The Nasa Prospect website is an award-winning example of how parallax scrolling can literally take you on a journey. New elements unfold as users are drawn in to experience the full story.

Tell your story through your website

Another design example is Evernote’s long-scroll homepage that includes the use of video, text, and images to completely explain what Evernote is. Grabbing the user’s attention immediately with video of people going about their everyday activities instantly instils a feeling of relatability, and the descriptions of the product’s functionality clearly take the user on a journey.

Your brand’s story can also be told through an interactive website that scrolls as you do and is created solely to make you drool. By including high-resolution images, links, and microsites to segment your many offerings, your homepage can easily attract and direct your users, such as the case with Food Dudes.

Designs that develop intriguing stories

The Life of Pi website is clearly dedicated to showing how the movie was made. From choosing the tiger to emulate, to the wave pool that was built to accommodate Pi’s journey, you’re given a tour of how the movie was made. Through the description of the CG process, and actual CG animations themselves, the website transforms into images that move as you scroll. A must-visit website for those looking for storytelling inspiration.
Storytelling includes clear calls-to-action

• Storytelling includes clear calls-to-action
Your website requires clear headline copy, web page copy, and content that directs your visitor’s along their journey needs. Whether that’s guiding them to what they can find with prominent navigation, or providing everything in your one-scroll homepage, displaying these “what next” buttons can ensure that you create a website that converts.

Research by Small Business Trends has found that only 20% of small B2B websites had clear calls-to-action. Your users need to know how to contact you and how to find exactly what they’re looking for so that you can turn them into customers.

Pixelcarve has been creating intriguing and thought-provoking designs that make our clients brands, services, and story jump off the page for almost two decades. By combining award-winning website design with inbound marketing, video creation, and SEO tactics, our team of designers and creators are able to deliver a well-rounded website that is geared to your viewers.

Get in touch with our team for stylistic and tasteful website design that tells a compelling story.