Using Storytelling in Website Design

What is Storytelling?

The term “storytelling” means to share a story about characters and their points of view within the framework of an interesting narrative.

It’s part of the human experience to tell stories – we’ve been doing it for millennia. Storytelling has two main functions – it keeps history alive and passes it down to descendant generations, it provides entertainment, and it helps us to engage with each other in order to provide various services.

The best way to enhance your storytelling is visually – with photos and video footage.

Storytelling in Web Design – Important in the 21st Century? 

Stories have always been a way to communicate – and a great website with fantastic web design is your business’s best communication tool. So why not incorporate the use of storytelling to market your products, services and business culture to online visitors?

How to Tell a Story Through Website Design

1. Start at the Beginning

In the timeless lyrics sung by Maria von Trapp in a fave musical dramedy. The Sound of Music: “Let’s start from the very beginning – a very good place to start!”

When you’re in the beginning stages of crafting your shiny new website, you need to decide how best to introduce your brand to your visitors. First impressions count in web design, and you need to communicate what kind of business you are as concisely as possible, right from the very beginning.

Visual cues like typography and graphic design elements, images, or video content are the most effective ways of making a visual impact to display your brand.

2. What’s In A Word?

The words in any story ultimately drive it forward. The same principle is true for the words on your website – used in your navigation menus, your blog article copy, and your call-to-action forms. Your business’s true personality is reflected from the web pages through your words and their tone.

Your wording should be planned throughout your website’s story to be cohesive and consistent. It’s vital to reflect your authenticity throughout your design and on every page. Words are so important as it is the only real way to connect personally with a company and the product.

3. Arranging the Chronology

Your website tells its story much like a printed book. It needs an organised timeline that takes visitors on a journey to reach a conclusion or respond to a CTA (call-to-action). The story will allow information to be consumed easily. It keeps the viewer from jumping ship before you can get your point across. It allows users to progress through the information at their own pace – but in a carefully mapped sequence, YOU tailored for them.

4. Parallax Scrolling

Parallax scrolling is a visual effect that enhances the feel of depth on a website by making the foreground and background elements move at different speeds. This design technique gives your website interesting layers that visitors can move through, which draws them to the story you’re trying to tell. Interactivity through this technique is a new approach that is incorporated into most websites of the new era. 

Read More: 6 Best Web Design Innovations for 2021

5. Using Background Images

Background images set the mood for your story and throughout your website. It can be a subtle tool that brings depth, and a chance to highlight part of your site’s message and focus visitor attention. Unlike written novels, or the higher-end news aggregators, you can’t hope to encompass your entire story to the public without images. 

6. Mascots and Personality

In traditional storytelling, a character or protagonist is usually the focus for driving the story forward. They ground the listener and allow them to feel personally invested in the story. Having a mascot or character focus is a good way to add personality to your business’s story. You can use your mascot or character as a vehicle for marketing your products and services. The authenticity of your character helps to connect visitors to you and helps to build that trusting relationship with your cause. 

7. Embedded Elements

Embedded elements on your website bring variety to the structure of the design. They are usually a mixture of video and audio elements that emphasize your story. Videos are known to bring about a higher click rate through social media and are the best way to create engagement. They are useful to keep site users more informed about your products and services as a whole and add eye-catching movement to your site. 

8. Conclusion or Resolution 

Every story needs to come to some kind of a conclusion – and so does your website! This is the point at which the visitor should have most of their questions answered. They now have a pretty good idea about your business, what it is and what it does. With good website design, having a strong and consistent story or theme including all of your elements of wording, video, and movement grabs and KEEPS the right kind of attention. Attention = customers!

The Moral of the Story

Lastly, storytelling through web design assists in influencing your visitors to take action. It relies on the idea of showing, as well as telling, to invite visitors into your business. Your website essentially puts a piece of you out there for everyone to see, so when you get stuck into figuring out the design of your next website, start with crafting a well-thought-out story to share with visitors, create engagement, and make your business successful!

Black Alsatian can’t wait to help you put your grown-up brand, vision and expertise into digital form in 2021. We take pride in our up-to-the-minute web development and digital marketing innovations.

Contact us ASAP and let’s get your business where it deserves to be!