The Ultimate Guide for Animating Webpages

A web page or webpage is a document, commonly written in HTML, that's viewed in a web browser. A web page is usually accessed by entering a URL address into a browser's address bar. A web page may contain text, graphics, and hyperlinks to other sites and files. It is used to provide information to viewers, including pictures or videos to assist illustrate important topics. A web page can also be used as a way to sell products or services to viewers. When you click a link provided by a search engine, you're accessing an internet page. The Internet consists of many sites, with more being added every day.

How can we design the webpage to make it more attractive for the user?

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets)

It is the language we use to style an HTML document

It describes how HTML elements should be displayed

The style definitions are normally saved in external .css files.

With an external stylesheet file, you can change the look of an entire website by changing just one file!

A simple example on how to use this tool

The output of this looks as shown below

It is designed so as to enable the separation of presentation and content

This separation can improve content accessibility, provide more flexibility and control in the specification of presentation

For example, under pre-CSS HTML, a heading element defined with red text would be written as:

The output of the above mentioned looks as follows:

Using CSS, the same element can be coded using style properties instead of HTML presentational attributes:

This can be viewed as the output for the code as:

An example of CSS with center-aligned and red-colored text

The following code follows like this:

Here p is a selector in CSS

color is a property, and red is the property value

text-align is a property, and center is the property value

Let us look into Cascading Style Sheets commonly called as CSS, one of the most famous and widely used tools in designing webpages

CSS Property for Font Color

This looks as follows:

CSS Property for Font Size

It looks like this:

Demonstration of the different border styles in CSS

This is as follows:

These are some of the ways by which we can beautify or add design to our webpages

!Important Rule

The CSS !Important rule is used on declarations to override any other declarations for property and ignore selector specificity. !Important rules will ensure that a specific declaration always applies to the matched elements. However, generally, it is good to avoid using !Important as bad practice

An example to explain !Important rule clearly

These detail out the important rules and guidelines we can follow to ensure we can design an efficient webpage

Animation tools

Hover Effects

It includes the alteration or changing of the appearance of the different components of the webpage when the mouse cursor hovers over it

The hover function is activated and used in CSS as a pseudo-class and the user hovers over it but does not necessarily activate it

We can build our own image gallery that can only be viewed when the cursor is moved over the thumbnail

Some easy to use Hover Tools

Hidden Door Twitter Button

Here, the users can easily interact with the website with the help of hovering action of the mouse cursor on top of the Twitter icon and a hidden door will appear

Cool Beans Button 60fps

The user has the option whether to use opacity or transforms for the animation of the webpage. This can be known by choosing 'will change: transform' or 'will change: opacity'

CSS3 Button Hover Effects with FontAwesome

This option is yet another unique option to design web pages. Being a part of CSS3, it has different ways of hover effects that have an arrow or hand pointer instead of a text which can easily connect with the user. The process of using the arrow or hand pointer is named as textual shift

Custom Icon CSS Button Hover

It makses use of 3D-animation. This button can be used in the call-to-action section that makes it more interesting and appealing to the user. Also, it is possible to edit the text inside the button

Animated Button With Rainbow Hover

These effects present the rainbow hue color effect. This appeals more to the user while there is a smooth transition in the website. It can be chosen from different shades and color palette

Transitions

A transition occurs when a CSS property changes from one value to another value over a period of time

The transition feature is further subdivided into four CSS properties, transition-property, transition-duration, transition-timing-function, transition-delay

The transition property defines the property which we wish to tapply the property of transition

The transition-duration property defines the total duration of how long the transition is to last. This duration is written like 2s which states that the total duration of the transition is for 2 seconds

The property of transition-timing-function defines how to transition occurs

The transition-delay property defines the waiting time or the delay before the transition is to begun. The value is written like 1s where there is a delay of 1 second after which the transition can start functioning

Some examples of Transition properties

Animation Libraries

Animate.css

It is an animation library that can easily be incorporated into our projects. Great for emphasis, home pages, sliders, and attention-guiding hints

To install this library, we can use npm and also import the package by invoking the following code

$ npm install animate.css --sav
import "animate.css"

After installing the package, we need to add the animate_animated class to the element

Using this we can easily mention the delay time, the length, and the interaction or transitions of the animation needed

The most important process we need to include is CSS file type in our page and then target the elements with animate class

The pages will once be animated when the page loads or if the classes are added via Javascript

Hover.css

The Hover.css library is almost the same as the Animate.css

One additional fact that it is unique from the Animate library is in the fact that it is used to focus on the state where the mouse hovers over the text or image or link in the hover state

This library comes with different animation styles which can also be used according to our needs

Hover.css library is one of the best tools that can cover a variety of animation effects to choose from

These are a few ways by which we can enhance the reader's attention and make it more appealing to the audience.

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