We turned a few blocks of downtown Mineola into a website you walk. Scroll down and you move up the street. Scroll back and you walk backward. The name for this is scrollytelling: a web page where the story moves as you scroll.
It's a good way to show a place, and a small shop can finally afford to build one. It also won't replace your phone number, and nobody has shown it brings in more calls.
You already know how to use one
If you can scroll Facebook, you can use one of these. There's nothing to learn and no buttons to find. The picture holds still on your screen and changes as your thumb moves, the way a flip book changes as the pages go by.
It got famous with an avalanche
In December 2012, The New York Times published Snow Fall, a story about a deadly avalanche. Pictures and video moved as readers scrolled. The Times reported more than 3.5 million page views in six days.
The Times made it famous, but it didn't invent it. Its own team said an existing tool from another developer gave them the idea for the scroll effects. Nobody seems to know who came up with the word, either. The earliest use I found was a German tech magazine in December 2013, and that writer was already treating it as an existing name.
You may hear the Times gave up on scrolling stories. I read the 2016 talk I think that story comes from, by Archie Tse of its graphics team. What he dropped was buttons and sliders. His line was "readers just want to scroll." I didn't find a count of how many the Times makes today, so I can't tell you if the number went down.
It used to take a newsroom
Snow Fall took more than a dozen people. The Mineola walk came out of one small web shop. AI redrew street photos as 87 ink drawings, a video model filled in the motion between them, and the AI bill came to under $20. The tools for the scrolling itself are free.
Walking down a street already feels like scrolling, so places are a natural fit. Think of a downtown, a venue, a farm, or a shop with a history people can't picture from a phone number.
Where it falls short
It hasn't been shown to sell. I read the studies I could find. People say they enjoy scrolling stories more than plain pages, but they don't reliably learn more from them. In one test of 240 people, scrolling did no better than clicking through. I found no study on calls or sales at a small business, so treat this as a way to be remembered and leave it at that.
It's heavy. The Mineola walk is about 15 MB. A typical home page is under 3 MB. On a weak signal, ours starts out rough and sharpens as the pictures arrive.
It can break on real phones. Our first version used a video, and iPhones wouldn't show it while you scrolled. The street just sat there while the captions kept moving. A real phone in a human's hand caught that.
It can make some folks dizzy. Phones have a setting that asks websites to cut down on motion. Until this week our full walk only half listened to it, and I found that while researching this post. Now anyone with that setting on gets the same drawings in a plain column, and the walk stays still.
Check your own site first
Pick up your phone and open your website. Before you scroll, can a stranger find your phone number, your hours, and what you do? About half of web visits in the US come from phones, and somebody hunting your hours doesn't want a movie.
If the answer is no, fix that first. It's usually an afternoon's work, and it will do more for you than any story.
If the answer is yes, ask a second question: what about this business do people have to see to get it? That's your story, if you have one. Plenty of businesses don't need one, and that's fine.
How it's going for us
We put a short version of the walk at the top of our home page, and we're counting how far people get before they quit. I don't have numbers worth reporting yet. When I do, I'll tell you how it turned out, good or bad.
Take the walk, then tell us what you think at pineywoodsweb.com/contact. If you've got a place or a story in mind, we'll tell you straight whether it's worth building.
Want this looked at on your own site? Send the business name and we will check it, no pitch.