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If you tweet about your life, a new algorithm can identify your most significant events and assemble them into an accurate life history, say the computer scientists who built it
With web users bombarded with so much information, web designers are constantly exploring new ways to deliver content. One-page websites are now being widely adopted with some of the biggest brands in the world using them to provide users with a fast, clean and simple experience that is simultaneously effective and beautiful.
Over the past few years, we’ve seen the trend towards one-page websites grow thanks to the introduction of HTML5 and jQuery, which make it easy to build stunning websites with nifty transitions and effects.
Below are 30 stunning one-page HTML5 websites, covering everything from minimalist design and simple navigation to parallax scrolling. If you’re looking for inspiration for your new single page HTML5 website, take a look at the list below:
Having won several awards, Trionn Design’s one-page HTML5 website uses parallax scrolling to make it easier for users to navigate through the site. This responsive design uses attractive images to keep users engaged, and also incorporates some great CSS effects.
Oakley have created this entertaining and eye catching site, combining parallax scrolling and amazing photography to showcase the new Airbrake MX goggles in a unique way.
Not only is this site stunning but it also provides useful information on your ’5 a day’, encouraging visitors to eat more fruit. The site makes use of clever parallax scrolling for a bright, almost video-like feel.
Graphic designer Laura Baffari has created a stunning interactive portfolio that uses horizontal scroll and touch swipe for smartphones and tablets. When entering the site you’ll see tiles displaying her work which can be scrolled through in any direction.
This one’s for all the romantics out there. This has to be the most unique way to confirm your attendance to a wedding. A beautiful story of a couple who met many years ago, this site uses parallax scrolling with some great animation and inventive typography.
Another portfolio bound to provide you with inspiration, freelance digital designer Ian James Cox has created an inventive doodle effect one-page website based around the “Duffy Bold” font and the popular Scroll Path jQuery plugin.
Footwear specialists Nike created a captivating website for the Air Jordan 2012. Built around the footwear itself, the site uses parallax scrolling to take visitors through the creation of the trainer and the materials used as it’s assembled.
Pizza fanatic Renato has created this alluring site for his pizza party business. Not only does this site make you hungry but the use of graphical elements throughout the page adds a nice touch.
Created by Martin Ringlein, Design Manager at Twitter, this one page design is truly unique. Use the arrows at the bottom to set the presentation slideshows in motion and see what Martin has been up to since 1999. If you’re looking for inspiration for an original navigation, do check this site out!
Smart Phood is a research project about how people eat. This colourful HTML5 one-pager has a unique scroll that gives it the ‘wow’ factor.
I can’t imagine how much work has gone into creating this one-page website. It uses parallax scrolling and loads of amazing transitions and graphic elements that you’re unlikely to see on any other site. Simply breathtaking!
An excellent interactive experience using parallax scrolling and amazing transitions and effects to present the complete journey of the shoe coming together.
This one-pager is as epic as the movie itself. It’s a stunning HTML5 parallax scrolling site that takes a behind-the-scenes look at some of the greatest moments of the movie.
The new Skoda Octavia’s dedicated HTML5 website invites visitors to discover it through an immersive animated experience. This stunning one-pager uses parallax scrolling and a unique type of navigation that creates an engaging experience.
An informative website which takes an in-depth look at how much water the average person consumes every day in the UK. The site uses graphic elements and transitions to spark conversation on an important issue.
Stylistically similar to Minecraft, Reverend Danger uses a range of animation and CSS techniques to create a fun experience for visitors. This one-pager combines an interesting slider at the top where visitors can change the images from ‘reverend to danger’.
Festa Italiana is another fun website that uses bright colours and graphical elements that move as you scroll down.
Quench your thirst with this website by Activate. As you scroll down the site you are presented with clickable floating bottles. The site has some excellent transitions and effects throughout.
D’Angelico guitars were embraced by many and remained popular until the 70′s. Now the legend is reborn with a stunning HTML5 one-pager that makes great use of sound and parallax scrolling to take you through the journey.
A unique take on the popular concept of the traditional infographic, this HTML5 one-page site present statistics from a report that reveals critical factors for small and midsize business success in 2013. Scroll down to see the transitions and effects that reveal the stats.
A fantastic one-page portfolio site in HTML5 with a zoomable user interface powered by SVG.
Jules Bassoleil’s single page portfolio has an amazingly logical and effective navigation with the graphics jumping out at you.
Italian web designer Sergio Pedercini has created an elegant site to display his portfolio. The bright colours and the bouncing navigation make it attractive and easy to use.
Fashion label Von Dutch’s use of parallax scrolling adds a sense of movement to its story. Icons and images move in and out of place as you scroll down the page, providing a fluid experience.
A simple yet attractive HTML5 one-pager that uses animation to provide a great floating effect.
Horizontal scrolling is quite common on creative agency websites, and Pixelmess’s site is an example of it working particularly well. The combination of retro fonts and illustrations makes you feel like you’re playing an old school video game which is even more engaging.
Renault uses a combination of parallax scrolling, audio and video to create an interactive and amazing experience for visitors.
This is one of the best product presentation sites I’ve seen lately. The site use of parallax scrolling to present swivelling chairs specifically designed for women.
This responsive HTML5 one-pager features a fluid layout that includes several interactive elements and animations to make it more engaging.
Children’s photographer Evi Hermans has created this fun and playful one-page website. Not only are the photos lovely, but this beautiful site is made even more interactive through the use of animations.
Do you wish you’d built these sites? Have you built a better one? Let us know in the comments.
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During the past four or five years of blogging regularly and doing research for other writing projects, I’ve come across probably thousands of articles on JavaScript.
To me, it seems that a big chunk of these articles can be divided into two very general categories:
Yes, I’ve likely stumbled upon a ton of other articles that don’t fall into either of these categories or that are more specific. But somehow it feels that most of the ones that really get pushed in the community fall under one of the two categories above.
I think those articles are great, and I hope we see more of them. But sometimes the simplest JavaScript features are sitting right under our noses and we just haven’t had a lot of exposure to them. I’m talking about native, more-or-less cross-browser features that have been in the language for some time.
So, in this article, I won’t be talking about jQuery, and I won’t be looking at structural code concepts or patterns. Instead, I’m going to introduce you to some pure JavaScript features that you can use today and that you might not have ever considered before.
Years ago, Microsoft introduced a method called insertAdjacentHTML() as a way to insert a specified string of text as HTML or XML into a specific place in the DOM. This feature has been available in Internet Explorer (IE) since version 4. Let’s see how it works.
Suppose you have the following HTML:
<div id="box1">
<p>Some example text</p>
</div>
<div id="box2">
<p>Some example text</p>
</div>
And suppose you want to insert another snippet of HTML between #box1 and #box2. You can do this quite easily using insertAdjacentHTML():
var box2 = document.getElementById("box2");
box2.insertAdjacentHTML('beforebegin', '<div><p>This gets inserted.</p></div>');
With that, the generated DOM ends up like this:
<div id="box1">
<p>Some example text</p>
</div>
<div><p>This gets inserted.</p></div>
<div id="box2">
<p>Some example text</p>
</div>
The insertAdjacentHTML() method takes two parameters. The first defines where you want to place the HTML, relative to the targeted element (in this case, the #box2 element). This may be one of the following four string values:
beforebeginafterbeginbeforeendafterendAgain, these are string values, not keywords, so they must be placed inside of single or double quotes.
The second parameter is the string you want to insert, also placed in quotes (or else it would be a variable holding a string that was previously defined). Note that it should be a string, not a DOM element or element collection; so, it could just be text, with no actual markup.
insertAdjacentHTML() has, as outlined in a post on Mozilla Hacks, a couple of advantages over something more conventional, like innerHTML(): It does not corrupt the existing DOM elements, and it performs better.
And if you’re wondering why this one hasn’t received a lot of attention so far, despite being well supported in all in-use versions of IE, the reason is probably that, as mentioned in the Mozilla Hacks article, it was not added to Firefox until version 8. Because all other major browsers support this, and Firefox users have been auto-updating since version 5, it’s quite safe to use.
For more on this method:
You can obtain the coordinates and, by extension, the dimensions of any element on the page using another lesser-known method, the getBoundingClientRect() method.
Here’s an example of how it might be used:
var box = document.getElementById('box'),
x, y, w;
x = box.getBoundingClientRect().left;
y = box.getBoundingClientRect().top;
if (box.getBoundingClientRect().width) {
w = box.getBoundingClientRect().width; // for modern browsers
} else {
w = box.offsetWidth; // for oldIE
}
console.log(x, y, w);
Here, we’ve targeted an element with an ID of box, and we’re accessing three properties of the getBoundingClientRect() method for the #box element. Here’s a summary of six fairly self-explanatory properties that this method exposes:
topleftrightbottomwidthheightAll of these properties are read-only. And notice that the coordinate properties (top, left, right and bottom) are all relative to the top-left of the viewport.
What about the if/else in the example from above? IE 6 to 8 don’t support the width and height properties; so, if you want full cross-browser support for those, you’ll have to use offsetWidth and/or offsetHeight.
As with insertAdjacentHTML(), despite the lack of support for width and height, this method has been supported in IE since ancient times, and it has support everywhere else that’s relevant, so it’s pretty safe to use.
I will concede something here: Getting the coordinates of an element using offset-based values (such as offsetWidth) is actually faster than using getBoundingClientRect(). Note, however, that offset-based values will always round to the nearest integer, whereas getBoundingClientRect()’s properties will return fractional values.
For more info:
If you’ve ever manipulated elements on the fly with JavaScript, then you’ve likely used methods such as createElement, removeChild, parentNode and related features. And you can manipulate HTML tables in this way, too.
But you may not realize that there is a very specific API for creating and manipulating HTML tables with JavaScript, and it has very good browser support. Let’s take a quick look at some of the methods and properties available with this API.
All of the following methods are available to be used on any HTML table element:
insertRow()deleteRow()insertCell()deleteCell()createCaption()deleteCaption()createTHead()deleteTHead()And then there are the following properties:
captiontHeadtFootrowsrows.cellsWith these features, we can create an entire table, including rows, cells, a caption and cell content. Here’s an example:
var table = document.createElement('table'),
tbody = document.createElement('tbody'),
i, rowcount;
table.appendChild(tbody);
for (i = 0; i <= 9; i++) {
rowcount = i + 1;
tbody.insertRow(i);
tbody.rows[i].insertCell(0);
tbody.rows[i].insertCell(1);
tbody.rows[i].insertCell(2);
tbody.rows[i].cells[0].appendChild(document.createTextNode('Row ' + rowcount + ', Cell 1'));
tbody.rows[i].cells[1].appendChild(document.createTextNode('Row 1, Cell 2'));
tbody.rows[i].cells[2].appendChild(document.createTextNode('Row 1, Cell 3'));
}
table.createCaption();
table.caption.appendChild(document.createTextNode('A DOM-Generated Table'));
document.body.appendChild(table);
The script above combines some customary core DOM methods with methods and properties of the HTMLTableElement API. The same code written without the table API might be considerably more complex and, thus, harder to read and maintain.
Once again, these table-related features have support all the way back to IE 7 (and probably earlier) and everywhere else that’s relevant, so feel free to use these methods and properties where you see fit.
For more info:
This discussion of specific native JavaScript features has been a reminder of sorts. We can easily become comfortable with the features of a language that we know well, without looking deeper into the language’s syntax for simpler and more maintainable ways to solve our problems.
So, from time to time, look inside the box, so to speak. That is, investigate all that vanilla JavaScript has to offer, and try not to rely too much on plugins and libraries, which can unnecessarily bloat your code.
(Credits of image on front page: nyuhuhuu)
(al ea)
© Louis Lazaris for Smashing Magazine, 2013.
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