OK so let me just start off by saying I have seen some really nice, really elegant parallax scrolling sites out there that work. Some companies just like the feel of them and want to provide this design style to their clients. It’s understood Web-speaking the fewer clicks/actions the better. You want your viewer to get to the pertinent information as soon as possible avoiding distractions, unnecessary ornaments etc. (said the guy with cartoon characters on his homepage). I imagine most folks might not agree with me on this one but just speaking honestly, I don’t like parallax sites and here are five reasons why:
1) I like to land on a page and click something – not wrestle with the scroll-knob on my mouse, the scrollbar on the right or add grease stains to my screen.
2) Scrolling on long sites can make site organization confusing – once I get a certain way down the page I suddenly find myself confused as to where in the site architecture I am located.
3) It might feel like I can keep everything on one page but I often find myself landing on a beautiful image of something and being unsure what to do … all pertinent info is off screen.
4) It can just be plain difficult to control the movement of the page as sometimes it bounces around causing me to lose track of what I was reading causing me to have to “catch” the page sometimes.
5) If it ain’t broke … clicking (finger or mouse wise) still works just fine and gets you right to where you need to go.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s not difficult to build a scrolling site and, as I say, I have seen some that work and look pretty cool; I’m just making the observation that the more I think about it (and the more I interact on my phone) the more frustrating such sites can be for me.