If you’re anything like us, you’re curious about how web designers are manipulating new CSS3 transitions and jQuery to create truly dynamic content. You know the kind of design features I’m talking about. They’re the parts of a website that move as you scroll down or as you hover over a specific element. Designers are constantly finding new ways to implement the updated languages. Here are a few new ideas for dynamic web design that will improve the user experience of your website.

Parallax scrolling

Now, it really depends on what kind of content you’re thinking about presenting to your visitors, because implementing some design features will hurt you more than help. Take Parallax scrolling, for example. It’s when you have various objects within an HTML document that look like they’re moving at different speeds as you scroll. It might not be the best option for a library website’s homepage. But for a landing page of a new product or service, it’s awesome. It gives users the feeling of floating, and your content becomes even more attractive.

The most common way to adapt this kind of dynamic web design is by placing image objects as background and hugged by text. The text scrolls quickly while the image seems to stay put (making it seem like the background image is changing). And best of all, all you need in order to register this effect is CSS.

Dynamic, resizing headers that stick

There are a lot of websites out there right now with dynamic headers. It’s really nice to have a big, fancy logo and menu on the landing page, but when a visitor starts scrolling, giant, sticky headers are annoyingly obtrusive. Wouldn’t it be great if they just shrank, giving you more viewing space? They do! You can use a bit of CSS and JavaScript to make your header resize on the scroll down but stick to the top for easy navigation.

The greatest benefit, of course, is continuity. Perhaps your site logo is in the header. Or perhaps you have a menu that needs to be constantly present. With dynamic resize, this can all be accomplished.

Animated Navigational Menus

We’ve come to the dynamic web design with the most swag. You must have seen the websites that have those cool animated navigation bars at the top. Some of these top bars show up below the header. When you scrolled down, they stick to the top! Not only that—they stick to the top after a dazzling CSS3 transition that makes it look super professional. Guess what? You can do this for your website too.

Like some of the other dynamic designs we have here, animated nav menus only need a bit of CSS3 and JavaScript. Remember when everyone used to build their dynamic drop down menus with JavaScript? This hid the menu content from Google’s spiders, and your site couldn’t be crawled properly. Now with jQuery and advanced CSS3, you can create these superb HTML list menus that react in any number of cool ways on scroll down.

What’s with tile navigation menus?

Another trend in the manipulation of CSS3 and HTML5 is creating fantastic menus with transitions on hover. All it takes is the CSS. There’s really no limit to the design possibilities when it comes to nav menus. Instead of a simple hover opacity or color, you can cause the element to expand or contract in whichever way you please, the text to grow or shrink, the color to fade. And you can control the speeds of each transition individually. You can create a full-width tile menu and compensate for mobile devices using a bit of JavaScript in order to establish a toggle menu that includes the very same tiles!

Basically, the updated web languages of CSS3, HTML5, and JavaScript have allowed designers to create ridiculously mouth-watering dynamic features. It makes our websites modern. It brings users back for more. And then we’re left staring at the effect, mesmerized. That’s modern web design.