This tutorial is out of date and no longer maintained.
Introduction
Today we’ll be looking at ways to spice up when people land on our sites. I just experimented with this a little bit on a personal project, CODE Hearted. You can see the logo and content are animated on page load so that it gives the page a little more life.
Not only can we use this technique to add a little pizazz, but we can also use it for UI/UX purposes to guide the user’s eyes across our page. Let’s say we only want a tagline to show up that tells a user what our site is about, then 3 seconds later, the content shows up. The combinations for this are unlimited and definitely play around with these animations and let your imagination go crazy. I went a little overboard I think on some animations (we probably wouldn’t want everything on a page to move), but it was more for demonstration purposes.
The main way to build this technique is using CSS3’s animation feature and the animation-delay.
Build It
This demo won’t work in all browsers since it is purely CSS3.
Let’s start by setting up our site. We are going to use the super awesome Animate.css by Dan Eden for our animations. Also Twitter Bootstrap. We can write up our own but we’ll use this to make it quick and easy.
Folder/File Structure
cssstyle.css
index.html
index.html
We’ll set up the HTML needed to set up our page. We’ll load bootstrap and animate.css from a CDN.
To use animate.css, we add a class of animated and the type of animation we want to use. These are found here on the cool demo page. After this, all the animations will run at the same time. We add specific classes to each to vary the animation time and that’s what gives us our varied effect.
<!doctype html>
<html>
<head>
<title>CSS3 Page Loading Animations</title>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="http://netdna.bootstrapcdn.com/bootstrap/3.0.0/css/bootstrap.min.css"><!-- load bootstrap -->
<link rel="stylesheet" href="http://cdn.jsdelivr.net/animatecss/2.1.0/animate.min.css"><!-- load animate -->
<link rel="stylesheet" href="css/style.css">
</head>
<body>
<div class="container">
<div id="header" class="row text-center">
<div id="logo">
<span id="danger">
<span class="dd animated bounceInDown">d</span>
<span class="da animated bounceInDown">a</span>
<span class="dn animated bounceInDown">n</span>
<span class="dg animated bounceInDown">g</span>
<span class="de animated bounceInDown">e</span>
<span class="dr animated bounceInDown">r</span>
</span>
<span id="zone">
<span class="zz animated bounceInDown">z</span>
<span class="zo animated bounceInDown">o</span>
<span class="zn animated bounceInDown">n</span>
<span class="ze animated bounceInDown">e</span>
</span>
</div>
<nav id="main-nav">
<ul class="list-unstyled list-inline">
<li><a id="demo-1" class="animated btn btn-danger" href="index.html">Demo 1</a></li>
<li><a id="demo-2" class="animated btn btn-danger" href="two.html">Demo 2</a></li>
<li><a id="demo-3" class="animated btn btn-danger" href="three.html">Demo 3</a></li>
</ul>
</nav>
</div>
<div id="main" class="row">
<div id="sidebar" class="col-sm-4">
<nav id="sidebar-nav">
<ul>
<li><a id="side-home" class="animated bounceInLeft" href="#">Home</a>
<li><a id="side-about" class="animated bounceInLeft" href="#">About</a>
<li><a id="side-work" class="animated bounceInLeft" href="#">Work</a>
<li><a id="side-contact" class="animated bounceInLeft" href="#">Contact</a>
</ul>
</nav>
</div>
<div id="content" class="animated bounceInUp col-sm-8 text-center">
<div class="row">
<div class="col-sm-4">
<img class="img-responsive animated bounceInUp" src="http://lorempixel.com/500/500/people">
</div>
<div class="col-sm-4">
<img class="img-responsive animated bounceInUp" src="http://lorempixel.com/500/500/nature">
</div>
<div class="col-sm-4">
<img class="img-responsive animated bounceInUp" src="http://lorempixel.com/500/500">
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</body>
</html>
Now we have a solid foundation for our site. Using animate, all of those things that are animated will now move when you view your site. Let’s add some more styling and then we’ll get to the animations.
/* BASE
============================================================================= */
@import url(http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Offside);
html { overflow-y:scroll; }
body { margin-top:40px; }
/* HEADER
============================================================================= */
#header { margin-bottom:50px; }
/* logo */
#logo { color:#FFF; font-family:'Offside'; font-size:80px; margin-bottom:50px; margin-top:50px; }
#logo span { display:inline-block; }
/* MAIN NAV
============================================================================= */
#main-nav { margin-bottom:30px; }
/* SIDEBAR
============================================================================= */
#sidebar { }
#sidebar-nav { }
#sidebar-nav ul { list-style:none; padding-left:0; }
#sidebar-nav li { }
#sidebar-nav a { background:#428bca; color:#FFF; display:block; margin-bottom:10px; padding:20px; text-transform:uppercase;
border-radius:2px; -moz-border-radius:2px; -webkit-border-radius:2px;
}
#sidebar-nav a:hover { background:#3276b1; text-decoration:none; }
/* CONTENT
============================================================================= */
#content { background:#FFF; min-height:400px; padding:20px;
border-radius:2px; -moz-border-radius:2px; -webkit-border-radius:2px;
}
#content img { border-radius:2px; -moz-border-radius:2px; -webkit-border-radius:2px; }
/* ANIMATIONS
============================================================================= */
/* logo */
.dd { animation-delay:0.2s; -moz-animation-delay:0.2s; -webkit-animation-delay:0.2s; }
.da { animation-delay:0.8s; -moz-animation-delay:0.8s; -webkit-animation-delay:0.8s; }
.dn { animation-delay:0.6s; -moz-animation-delay:0.6s; -webkit-animation-delay:0.6s; }
.dg { animation-delay:1s; -moz-animation-delay:1s; -webkit-animation-delay:1s; }
.de { animation-delay:0.4s; -moz-animation-delay:0.4s; -webkit-animation-delay:0.4s; }
.dr { animation-delay:1.2s; -moz-animation-delay:1.2s; -webkit-animation-delay:1.2s; }
.zz { animation-delay:1.4s; -moz-animation-delay:1.4s; -webkit-animation-delay:1.4s; }
.zo { animation-delay:0.4s; -moz-animation-delay:0.4s; -webkit-animation-delay:0.4s; }
.zn { animation-delay:0.6s; -moz-animation-delay:0.6s; -webkit-animation-delay:0.6s; }
.ze { animation-delay:0.5s; -moz-animation-delay:0.5s; -webkit-animation-delay:0.5s; }
/* sidebar */
#side-home { animation-delay:0.2s; -moz-animation-delay:0.2s; -webkit-animation-delay:0.2s; }
#side-about { animation-delay:0.6s; -moz-animation-delay:0.6s; -webkit-animation-delay:0.6s; }
#side-work { animation-delay:0.8s; -moz-animation-delay:0.8s; -webkit-animation-delay:0.8s; }
#side-contact { animation-delay:0.3s; -moz-animation-delay:0.3s; -webkit-animation-delay:0.3s; }
/* content */
#content { animation-delay:1.5s; -moz-animation-delay:1.5s; -webkit-animation-delay:1.5s; }
#content img { animation-delay:1.7s; -moz-animation-delay:1.7s; -webkit-animation-delay:1.7s; }
And that’s it! By adding the variable animation-delays times you can create some pretty sweet animations.
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