Dieter Petereit May 14th, 2014

Full Throttle Development: Website Design Software Webydo Goes Parallax – Participate in The Closed Beta (Invite Only)

Webydo's developers must be on steroids. The community-driven development process sparks more innovation in a few months than other companies find in their whole lifetime. The latest feature announcement promises the availability of one of the hottest trends in web design today, Parallax Scrolling. And it promises to deliver it code-free and with pixel-perfect accuracy. Good news for the non-developing designers in the industry out there

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Webydo has given Noupe the opportunity to invite their readers to try the closed beta. This is an invitation only process following first come first serve. The first 8,000 that will send their invites, will get the chance to join the closed beta. Just a week ago Webydo released 2,000 invitations and they were all gone in a matter of 1.5 hours. So, make sure to apply quickly. The application period ends seven days after the publication of this article, thus on the 21st of May, but note that invites will not last that long.

Webydo, The Center of Your Web Design Business

If you are an avid reader of our lovely Noupe Magazine, you sure do remember Webydo. We've covered the service from Tel Aviv quite a few times already. In this article we took a thorough in-depth look into what Webydo offers and who it aims at. Read it and you'll know that Webydo is not just an average homepage builder, but is more like a professional design platform in the tradition of Adobe InDesign or Photoshop.

webydo-landingpage

On top of giving you the features to create a professional website from scratch without being able to code, they provide professional designers with the ability to ‘bill your clients’ directly from inside your Webydo dashboard or white-label the whole system, putting your brand logo front and center so when your clients enter the CMS to make content changes, they immediately know where they’re at. With top-notch design features and an invoice and administration interface, there's little more you would need besides Webydo.

To give you an impression of how websites created with website builders actually look, wiping away all the rumors that claim unprofessionalism, we compiled 25 designs in this article. And to provide you with even more insight into Webydo's philosophy, we shared their infographic titled "Web Design Industry Analysis" in this article. Webydo is striving to become the go-to place for the professional designer, who wants a piece of the web design business, and rightfully so. There are platforms for professional developers, namely any of the CMSs out there, and there are solutions for the amateur, such as Weebly, Moonfruit and quite some.

Webydo sees itself as the third pillar between CMS and homepage builder. And more than 83,000 designers already trust them and keep creating awesome sites on their technology.

Webydo Participate: Customer-centric Development

As trust is always best when it comes both ways, Webydo trusts their users and puts the whole development process of the platform into their hands. A system called "Participate" lets designers using Webydo propose features and vote on proposed features. Strictly the features with the most votes get developed first. This is customer-centric development at its best.

One of these features is the first "Code-Free Parallax Scrolling Animator". The Animator is not yet ready for prime time, but will be available in the next couple of weeks. With parallax scrolling, Webydo makes one of the hottest trend in today's web design available to pure designers.

Webydo's New "Code-Free Parallax Scrolling Animator"

If you aren’t quite yet acquainted with what parallax scrolling is or offers, read on to the examples section. We have a small list of parallax sites there, which show the functionality of Webydo's Parallax Scrolling Animator quite impressively, though they were not created using it. Webydo promises that you can create designs just like these with their new feature.

Parallax1920_1080_5 Webydo's Newest Feature in GIF Action...

To the more technically savvy, parallax scrolling is a way of animating scenes that is pretty similar to what you see when you look out of a train window at cruise speed. The nearer an element is to your eyes the faster it moves out of sight, while the mountains and trees on the horizon seem to not move at all. In design speech we say, that parallax (from Greek "parallaxis", meaning "alteration" in English) marks the designer’s ability to move elements on a web page at different rates and paths. As a user scrolls down the page, parallax creates the impression of depth, movement, and animation.

In a usual development process, parallax sites are created by manually coding the movement of each and every pixel throughout each and every page. Needless to emphasize, that this is a very time-consuming and error-prone way of doing so. The costs are high as the amount of hours needed to complete the project is high, too.

Now, with Webydo's latest effort, designers will be able to create pixel-perfect parallax websites without having to code a single line. Instead the "Code-Free Parallax Scrolling Animator" will be available from inside the WYSIWYG environment, integrating seamlessly into the other features and design studio. You will be able to animate your parallax sites visually, and preview them at any stage of the process. In a conventional process, previewing of design choices and compositions is only possible at the end of it. With Webydo your parallax site is a work in progress in the best thinkable way. Tweak any detail as long as you see fit.

webydo-parallax-path10

So, here are the main advantages of the "Code-Free Parallax Scrolling Animator" at a glance:

  • Create Motion With An Illusion of Depth Elements move individually as the user scrolls the page
  • Define Scrolling Events And Motion Paths Set motion paths, opacity, rotation, and speed
  • Design With An Easy-to-Use Visual Interface Create unique pixel-perfect motion paths for every design element, code-free.

Examples for Impressive Parallax Scrolling

As I mentioned earlier, the following examples have not been created with Webydo. Once the parallax scrolling animator gets into the wild, you will be able to create sites like these with the functionality that the new feature will provide.

Now, what do you say? Will you go for parallax in one of your upcoming projects? Oh, and don't forget to apply for an invite here...

Dieter Petereit

Dieter Petereit is a veteran of the web with over 25 years of experience in the world of IT. As soon as Netscape became available he started to do what already at that time was called web design and has carried on ever since. Two decades ago he started writing for several online publications, some well, some lesser known. You can meet him over on Google+.

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