The World Wide Web has become so incredibly huge, with millions of websites representing every human aspect and complexity, that standing out from competitors with a digital project is becoming a really difficult task. But every once in a while, we browse into a project that leaves us really amazed.
That was the case when we first clicked on the Nike Better World link. It is all about scrolling! From the web producer point of view, this web site is entirely beautiful for various reasons.
First of all it achieves something that should be a standard in the industry by now: an online art direction which is in fact really thinking online. Ian Coyle and Duane King, together with Wieden + Kennedy Portland designed a one page scrolling website that makes use of several layered images that scroll at different speeds to generate an awesome visual effect.
Alternative to the scrolling-down navigation there is a little menu to the right where you can click and scroll to any of the 11 sections. And a little surprise in the final section: a nice pixel counter that will keep track of how many units you have scrolled down. Simple, but cute!
From the performance point of view there are some issues going on, and not all of them are good. While the site uses some HTML5 coding, which we think is great and positive to start achieving the so-called semantic web, it is not needed at all in this case, where classic divs could have been use without any UX change.
Then we have the dynamic scroll issue: in order to detect any change in the scroll position, a browser-scroll event must be running constantly, which is enough for some old-generation-coded browsers to crack. Once again, Chrome and Webkit based browsers deliver a much better performance in these cases.
Web design is clearly going that way, with greater JavaScript and more complex CSS3 coding for you to render, so… way to go Opera, Firefox and mostly IE.
Carlos Wassmann is ensegna <studio> founder and co-manager.
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