Parallax: What am I missing? Is there anything great about it?

[KempRugeLawGroup]

It seems like everywhere I turn, people are using parallax themes. Now, with responsive design themes, I understood that change, because google pretty much said to do that. But, I don't see why parallax has gained such popularity. Is there an SEO benefit to it? Are there studies showing it serves much better UX? Etc?

Curious and thankful,

Ruben

[KempRugeLawGroup]

Hi Jeff,

I really appreciate the articles.

Thanks,

Ruben

[KempRugeLawGroup]

Thanks everyone!

[Travis_Bailey]

Parallax is basically the latter day rotating banner. Though it's not always one page. As everyone has said before, it can look cool, but it has the drawbacks of just about every bell and whistle. This one usually requires the site to load not one, but at least two huge images.

So there's no real known benefit. There are mostly apparent drawbacks. Would you rather someone spend their time scrolling up and down for giggles, or get what they need? I find it more of a distraction than anything.

Then again, I'm a curmudgeon that would be happy if everything looked like the Nielsen website.

[customerparadigm.com]

Parallax design is a hot design topic, but I haven't seen any real A-B split test that shows a real difference.

In general, I'm not a huge fan of the one-page, scrolling website. I think that it's okay for a small business site with not much to say. But it severely limits building deep content pages... the sort of 12,000 word pages I love to write that delve into a topic and set you apart as an authoritative expert in the field.

Search Engine Land does have this great article about the perils of Parallax design for SEO:
http://searchengineland.com/the-perils-of-parallax-design-for-seo-164919

Key takeaway: The one-page, long scrolling website that so many design agencies love to use doesn't really give you more than one page of content for your whole site.

This is a good article about Parallax design, and how it impacts the end user experience.
http://uxmag.com/articles/the-hypnotic-effect-of-parallax-scrolling-and-how-it-impacts-user-experience

Key takeaways:

• Parallax can be hypnotic and engaging (but there's no real data behind this)
• Page load times can increase (bad for SEO) because you have one really long page.

A student at Purdue wrote a thesis about it, and says it's "more fun" for the end user, but that's about it.
http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/cgttheses/27/

Hope this helps!
-- Jeff

[jcommerce]

I think this is a design preference rather than an "SEO Benefit".  Parallax offers clean design for a site is more detailed than  landing page and less detailed than a full-on-website.  I think the user benefit comes in to play with clean design and a mobile friendly environment.  And when done well, they look super cool.