Creating websites, it’s a strange profession. The Internet has matured to the point where people rarely get excited about a new website launch. It seems best you can hope for is to keep the complaints to a minimum. The projects can be extremely expensive and time consuming too. Is Hype a better way to build a website? While working on A Book About Hype, this was a question I intended to answer.
Hype is animation software. It’s more of a replacement for Flash, rather than a replacement for Dreamweaver. Yet, many people wonder if they can build a whole website with Hype. The software isn’t optimized for that job. But for a static website… eh… it can kinda work. As a test, I decided to build a promo webpage for the book. The results were surprisingly good…
With a little tinkering, a responsive menu was crafted. It’s the kind of quality that is expected from a modern website. For improved usability, it’s even has a “Sticky Menu”. Instead of scrolling off the page, the menu sticks to the top of the screen. And for improved accessibility, the menu items can be highlighted with the tab key. Once a menu item is highlighted, it can be activated with the spacebar. Just a tap-tap-boom to easily navigate the page.
Those waypoint effects are so sweet too. With Physics-based elements that bounce into the scene, the main banner is animated. Scrolling the page back to the top can restart the animation. The Hype logo is drawn into view too. These effects could be exceptionally difficult to recreate with other WYSIWYG editors — but this is just the beginning. Hype is capable of so much more. It’s a tabula rasa, a clean slate. You’re not limited to some cookie-cutter template. Instead, Hype can be used to create a webpage that people are actually excited to see. That’s the theory anyway. Hopefully the golden era of the Internet is ahead of us, not stuck back in the late 90s.
One of the main objectives for the book is to encourage web designers / developers to make great websites again. The Internet is kinda boring these days. That’s because it’s so difficult to create something beautiful on mobile and desktop. While not perfect, Hype has the tools to make that happen.
You can download the Webpage Template to see how it works. More details are in A Book About Hype.