A Beginners Take on Creating a Spooky Website

IDEA

Have you ever been to a website and just thought....nope I really don't like you. Well, that's exactly what happened to me which lead me into thinking.. how would I do it?

DESIGN

Background: This is a company in my area which runs amazingly scary Halloween events which are becoming more and more popular every year.

The original website was not laid out clearly, difficult to read and navigate. Plus, definitely was not spooky enough!!

So obviously this was only a quick design I came up with just to practice some different coding techniques as I am only a beginner. I find the method of actually trying to build something is easiest for me to learn to code!

The key concept I focused on here was setting the mood, whilst making it look professional so it will attract customers. So how can I set the mood all with a bit of code? It needed to be eerie, dark, have ghosts and BLOOD!

PLANNING

I decided to just use HTML and SCSS for this 'mini-project' with some JavaScript if needed. I am extremely new at SCSS so have been trying to use it as much as possible so saw this as the perfect opportunity.

• Home-hero

The most important section. The first thing a customer sees, will they scroll for more? Or will they press that dreaded back button? This needed to be eyecatching, set the mood and make people want more in all just a few pixels.

I spend a lot of time scrolling through Pinterest and Dribbble getting ideas on the latest "hot" website trends - I highly recommend doing this to improve your designs! - but saw a text glitch effect I loved. Sorry, but I can't remember where or when I originally saw it! So I set to Google and found many a tutorial on how to do this. Perfect, I would be able to catch the eerie tone almost immediately with just one effect. Add a dark scary background and a navbar... BOOM home-hero planned.

• New Events

A section made to entice existing customers back and new ones!

It works as an advertisement so I wanted it to be very interactive to represent how the event is. I also like how cards are used on websites as it makes it really clear what you are offering. So back to Google to find some interactive cards using just HTML and SCSS.

• Highlights

This is purely an informational section and shows off what you've got.

Whilst searching for interactive cards for the previous section I found 'flipping cards' I decided to use this for this section as it encourages people to click and find out more.

• Slogan

"Do you dare?" I questioned how could I make this extremely effective... BLOOD!

Whilst scrolling through front-end ideas I saw tutorials on how to make water drips, in my mind, it was easy enough to change the colour and turn this into a blood dripping effect. Totally thrilling!

THE CODE

• Home-hero

Code for the Glitchy text and Glitch Effect background on the image.

• New Events

Interactive cards with animated bar and button.

• Highlights

Informational flip cards.

• Slogan

Slogan with dripping blood effect.

• Extras

The arrow I used in the home-hero.

Outcome

I absolutely adored how the final outcome turned out. For something that only took me a couple of hours and was only meant to be a quick project to practice some new code, I think it captured everything I wanted.

I also learnt lots of new things in the process. Using CSS animations to create a blood drip was actually pretty difficult and complex so definitely an area I need to return to so I fully understand as if used correctly it can look really effective. The same with the flip cards which were surprising. My favourite part had to be creating the Glitch effect, I just think it looks so cool!

View the full outcome on my twitter:

Conclusion

I have been learning code for just over a month now and I am really enjoying it. I love how this turned out, it is always super satisfying when something comes out better than you imagined it. Of course, it isn't perfect, I still feel like I barely know what I am doing. So if you have any suggestions or feedback, please feel free to let me know as I am keen to learn new things!

Disclaimer: Please be aware I did follow tutorials for all of the above but tried my best to make the code my own so sorry if it isn't perfect. It also isn't responsive as this wasn't what I was focusing on