Websites
A website people remember walking through
When a site should be a story you scroll, when it should not, and how to keep it fast and findable either way.
Most websites are built to be scanned: a menu, a hero, a grid of services, a contact form. That is right for most businesses most of the time. But some sites have a different job. They need to change how someone feels about a place, an idea or a company before that person is ready to read a single detail. For those, we build a walk rather than a brochure.
When a story is the right shape
A narrative, scroll-driven website earns its place when:
- the subject is an experience, such as a hotel, a restaurant, an event or a destination, and the visitor needs to imagine being there;
- the argument has an order: you need people to understand A before B makes sense, as in a pitch or a proposal;
- attention is the problem: the audience has seen a hundred similar sites and the first ten seconds decide everything.
Our site for Sliema Chalet opens with a single question, “are you listening?”, and tells the venue’s legend in three movements before asking anyone to apply. The Junior Eurovision proposal explained what a Maltese festa really is before it showed a logo. In both cases, the order was the point.
When it is the wrong shape
If people arrive knowing exactly what they want, such as opening hours, a price list, or a booking, a story gets in the way. The fix is not to abandon the story but to give impatient visitors a fast lane: a visible menu, a direct link to the thing they came for, and pages that make sense on their own when someone lands on them from a search.
A story should be the scenic route, never the only road.
Keeping it fast
Motion-heavy sites have a reputation for being slow. They do not have to be. The rules we follow:
- Video, not hundreds of images. A scroll film is one compressed video file, scrubbed by the scroll position, rather than a sequence of stills.
- Modern codecs first. AV1 where the browser supports it, H.264 everywhere else, at sizes matched to the screen.
- Nothing loads before it is needed. Each chapter loads as the visitor approaches it.
- Respect “reduce motion”. Visitors who ask their device for less motion get still images and the same words.
Keeping it findable
Search engines read text, not films. Every sentence that appears over a moving image on our sites is real text in the page, with proper headings, so it can be indexed and read aloud by a screen reader. Each project also has its own page with a descriptive title, a summary and structured data, so the story can be discovered one chapter at a time.
The test
We ask one question of every narrative site before launch: if someone watched only the first fifteen seconds, would they know what this is and want to see more? If the answer is no, the story is too slow, however beautiful it is.
If you are planning a site that needs to be felt as much as read, tell us about it.
