There are some great websites emerging that have been built using HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript and really show off what the web is capable of. Why settle for a traditional layout when you can stand out with a website like one of these:
1. Razor Fish
Do you ever get that feeling at work that your boss is watching you? Well how about the whole world? Razorfish use 17 live camera feeds from their offices around the world as backgrounds for their website. You can choose which feed you watch from a bar at the bottom of the screen and you are shown a highly pixelated live feed from the office of your choice. This is a really great design although I’m not sure how much the employees like it! The website content all appears from drop down bars at the top of the page so you never lose sight of your chosen office.
2.Newsmap
Newsmap is a great news reader that allows you to sort news stories by location, time and type and then displays it in digestible blocks. So if you want to see technology stories from the UK that broke in the last 10 minutes then you can. But if you want to see all stories then Newsmap colour codes depending on category and age of news and gives more screen space to bigger stories.
3.The Wilderness Downtown
This website was built to display an interactive HTML5 film for the Arcade Fire Song ‘The Wilderness Downtown’. You simply enter your hometown address and the site generates a custom video, built from pop ups that include clips from the Arcade Fire video interspersed with Google maps images (Street view and Satellite images) to produce a personalised music video that makes you feel like you’re part of the song. Pop ups appear at different times and have overlays in the style of the video.
4.Qwiki
Qwiki is a new method of digesting information from a number of different Wikis. Search for a subject and Qwiki produces an interactive timeline of text, images, maps and videos, collated from different Wikis on the web. Great for discovering new locations and information. Each entry is clickable so you can see the original source, maps can be played with and videos paused. Also you can jump to any point in the timeline, add voice and share your timelines with friends. Also comes with a ‘related’ tab so you can end up lost for hours in the rich collection of media.
5.AgencyNet
As a creative digital agency, it is important for AgencyNet to have an impressive website. They break from conventions by placing all content on a single page which you either scroll through or jump to using the ‘Recent Successes’ tool which recognises each entry as a separate page even though all the content is in one frame. Each ‘page’ is an infographic of a past project which includes examples of the website and branding they created, and results such as ‘Sales up 34% from summer ’10 to summer 11’. Really attractive site and design which shows off their work and gives stats to back up success!
I personally like more conventional but original designs and with the integration of jQuery with CSS3 and HTML5 there’s nothing that we cannot accomplish 🙂