Motion Is The Only Thing On A Web Page That A Visitor Cannot Ignore
Everything else on your site is optional. Your headline is optional. Your photograph is optional. Your offer, your price, your guarantee, all optional, because a stranger can decline to read any of it and usually does.
Movement is not optional. It is processed before the decision to read is made.
Go on, drag across it. Your hand moved before you decided it would. I want this for my business →
This is not a design opinion. It is older than design. Long before anyone built a website, the human eye was solving one problem continuously: what in this field of vision is changing? Stillness is background. Movement is information. The eye goes there first, involuntarily, and the conscious mind is informed afterwards.
There's a bloke on Yeovil market who sells more vegetable peelers than the shop forty feet away sells anything, and he does it with a carrot.
He doesn't have a shop. He doesn't have a sign worth looking at. What he has is a hand, a carrot, and a peeler, and he never stops moving it.
You walk past, you see the peel coming off in one long ribbon, and your legs stop before your brain has agreed to it. That's not salesmanship. That's just how eyes work. The shop forty feet away has the same peeler in a box behind glass, priced lower, and you have walked past it eleven times without once seeing it.
Now go and look at the top of your website. Which one is it?
The First Four Hundred Pixels Are Where Your Site Is Decided
I already know. It's the shop window.
Big AI-generated photo of four people laughing in a field. Headline over the top in a sans-serif font. A button that says “Get Started.” Beautifully arranged, professionally chosen, absolutely still.
I watched a photograph exactly like that cost a company its best sales year. More on that in a minute.
Maybe yours is the one with the woman pointing at a laptop while two colleagues nod at whatever's on it. (Nobody has ever nodded at a laptop like that. Nobody.) Maybe it's the sunrise over the city. Maybe it's the abstract purple gradient.
Doesn't matter. Same window, same glass, same nobody stopping.
And Here's What Actually Winds Me Up About It.
Your product is good.
That's the whole reason this is worth being annoyed about. You've got the offer that works, the copy that converts, the reviews, the guarantee, the thing you spent nine months getting right. It all sits further down the page.
Further down a page nobody travels down, because the first screen told them they'd already seen this site.
They hadn't. It just looked like they had. Three seconds and they're gone, and you never got to make your argument. You didn't lose the sale. You never got to have it.
Bring 1974 Back To Life.
A wedding photographer doesn't sell photographs. They sell the day, fifty years later, still warm. Let the visitor scrub the colour back into somebody's album and they'll understand what you're really charging for, without being told.
I want this for my business →Your Site Isn't Bad. It's Just Standing Still.
I'm not one of those people who tells you everything you've built is rubbish and then quotes you to rebuild it.
Your site is fine. It loads, it works, the checkout doesn't break, and the people who reach the bottom of it buy things.
It's the first four hundred pixels that are dead on arrival. A photograph of a business rather than a business. The visitor's finger is already heading for the back button while your headline is still being read.
Who's The Bloke Telling You All This?
Fifteen years, same desk.
I was the IT manager at a gourmet food company for fifteen years. Before that I'd been building websites since the early nineties, so their site was mine as well.
That's not a designer's job. It's an IT job, and it mattered, because it meant the sales figures and the website analytics landed on the same desk. Mine. Every month, for fifteen years.
Most people who build websites never find out what happened next. They hand it over and go home. I couldn't go home.
Then I built something that moved.
Five years ago I built that site a hero section that moved as you scrolled. There was no name for the technique then and nothing to copy. I built it because I wanted to see whether I could.
Then I read the analytics. Visitors were staying five times as long as before. Not five percent. Five times. And they were buying. The company had salespeople out on the road, and the website had quietly started doing better than they were.
Then marketing found a photograph.
A family around a dinner table, three generations, good light, taken by a professional. They put it up in place of the moving hero.
Sales fell.
Same product. Same prices. Same traffic. Not one word below the top of the page had changed. One thing was different, and it was the first thing anybody saw.
Nobody upstairs thought the two were connected. They liked the photograph. I had the numbers and I couldn't make a single person care.
Then I left.
So I left, and now I build one thing. Hero sections. Not brands, not funnels, not ten-page rebuilds. The first four hundred pixels, the bit that decides whether anybody reads the rest of what you paid for.
It's a narrow trade. That's the point. A man with one job gets frighteningly good at it.
Before You Fix It The Expensive Way...
Because I know what you're about to do, and all four options are worse than the one I'm about to give you.
New field, new smiling people, still nothing moving. You've rearranged the window display in a shop nobody walks into.
Six grand, three months, and at the end the agency hands you a site with a big photo at the top and a headline over it, because that's what agencies build. Congratulations, you've bought the identical problem in a nicer typeface.
Day rates. Discovery call. Scoping document. You'll spend more than three hundred quid before anyone opens a design file.
which is the most popular option and the only one you pay for forever. Keep buying the traffic, keep feeding it to a still window, keep never seeing a line item for what it costs. That's the trick of doing nothing. No invoice arrives. The money leaves anyway.
Clients Can't Read Drawings.
Every architect knows the moment: you hand over a beautiful set of plans and the client nods politely at lines they cannot see a home in.
This one they can read. The mouse builds it. Lights on.
I want this for my business →How A Moving Hero Section Stops A Visitor Who Has Already Decided To Leave
You've just spent four minutes doing it to yourself. Here's the mechanism, in three parts. Each one plugs a specific hole.
The Three-Second Hook
A visitor decides whether to stay in about three seconds, and makes that decision before reading a word. The opening frame has one job: interrupt the decision before it finishes.
Looking good is a different job. Most hero sections do the second one and skip the first.
Scroll-Scrub Motion
This is the part that made a food company money for four years.
The hero moves against the visitor's own scroll wheel, so they're the one driving it. They scroll, it moves. They stop, it stops.
And here's the sneaky bit: a person who is operating something is not a person deciding whether to leave. They keep going to see what it does next. What it does next is hand them your page.
The one I built five years ago held visitors on the site five times longer than the still image it replaced.
The Descent
Most heroes, even the pretty ones, are a full stop. The animation finishes, the visitor arrives at the bottom of it, and nothing is pulling them any further. They enjoyed your hero and then they left.
The Descent delivers them downward with the movement still attached, straight into your product.
Everyone gets this bit wrong. Everyone.
Show Them What The Vet Sees.
In pet care the whole sale is trust, and a paragraph about “compassionate, thorough care” earns none of it. One pass of the cursor over the good boy and there's the thoroughness, in his actual bones.
I want this for my business →Here's The Sort Of Thing I Mean.
Every panel below is a hero section wearing somebody else's business. That painting that emptied the sea into the cabin up there? That's a hero section, and it is the reason you are still reading. Run your mouse over these and imagine the top of your page doing it to a visitor who was halfway out.
The Cloud Lifts For Whoever's Looking.
Nobody buys a waterproof. They buy the morning the cloud burns off the ridge while they're stood on it. So the top of the page hands them that morning, and the jacket comes along for the walk.
Rest your mouse on the peak. Then take it off again.
I want this for my business →Sell June In February.
Every gardener you've ever met is buying for a summer that hasn't happened yet. Your hero section shouldn't show the mud. It should show them what the mud is for.
Point at the lawn. There's June.
I want this for my business →The Lava Is The Product.
You could shoot the bottle on a white background, like every other sauce on the shelf. Or the volcano could pour your sauce, and the visitor could hold the ladle.
Go on. Point at it.
I want this for my business →Every Detailer Has A Before-And-After.
And they all sit side by side in the same tired gallery. This before-and-after happens under the customer's own hand, which is precisely where you'd like their car to be.
I want this for my business →Everything They Own, On The Pavement.
Nobody hires a removals firm because they want a van. They hire one because they are frightened of exactly this: the sofa in the road, the boxes in the hedge, the wedding china somewhere under the hoover. So show them. Drag across, and the visitor empties the van into the street with their own hand.
Now drag it back. Watch every last thing go back in, boxed and strapped. That second half is what you sell. The first half is why they pay for it.
I want this for my business →Fly Them Over It.
Ten thousand feet of weather, and the visitor's own hand flying the aircraft. Estates, adventure holidays, wedding venues, anywhere the view is the thing you are actually selling. Drag across and the storm rolls in over the ridge.
Your hand. Your aircraft.
I want this for my business →Three Designs. Five Revisions. Three Hundred Quid.
Not one design you either like or awkwardly accept. Three, pulling in different directions, so you're choosing rather than settling.
Five rounds of revisions. Not “one round included, further amendments quoted separately.” Five. Push it until you actually like it.
And it drops onto the site you've already got. No rebuild, no migration, no three-month project with a kickoff call and a Slack channel nobody posts in.
Set £300 against the alternatives.
- A redesign quote is six grand and a quarter of your year.
- A month of ad spend poured into a still window is, for most of the people who email me, somewhere north of a thousand pounds. And you'll do it again next month.
- One customer who never scrolled is four hundred quid, or nine hundred, or four grand, depending on what you sell. And there was more than one of them.
Three hundred is a rounding error with a chance of being the best money you spend this quarter.
Fifty Quid To See It. Three Hundred To Own It. The Fifty Comes Off.
No monthly fee. No hosting charge. No “further amendments quoted separately.” Two numbers, and you already know both of them.
The Mockup
- ✓Your logo, your colours, your words, your product
- ✓A scroll-scrub hero built for your business, not a template
- ✓Sent as a link. Open it on your phone, in the car park
- ✓Live for a week, so you can show whoever needs to see it
- ✓Hate it? That's the end of it. I'm not chasing you
The Build
- ✓Three designs, pulling in different directions, so you choose rather than settle
- ✓Five rounds of revisions. Not one. Push it until you actually like it
- ✓The three-second hook, the scroll-scrub, and the descent. All three parts
- ✓Installed on your existing page. No rebuild, no migration, no Slack channel
- ✓Works on phones, where most of your visitors are
Sell The Oven Spring.
The loaf rises and browns where the cursor lands, and somewhere behind the eyes the smell arrives on its own.
Hungry visitors read to the bottom. Hungry visitors click.
I want this for my business →I Could Show You Testimonials. Here's A Dog Instead.
Every website on earth has three smiling strangers saying “absolute game changer”. You have never believed one of them and neither have I. (Mine would be real. You would still skim past them.)
So here is a harder kind of proof. Move your cursor. He watches you. Drag downwards and he lies down. Click him and he spins.
Nobody typed a word of that, and you did it anyway.
That is a dog food brand's hero section, and you just spent forty seconds playing with it. Ask yourself honestly how long you spend on the top of a normal website. Three seconds, and you are gone. That gap is the entire product.
Quick Warning, Because I Don't Want Your Money If This Won't Work.
If your product doesn't convert, don't buy this. All I'd do is deliver more people, faster, to an offer that isn't ready. Sort the offer out and then come back, I'll be here.
This is for people who already sell, and are quietly losing it all at the top of the page.
Nobody Buys A Cold Hearth.
They buy the evening in that chair with the rain on the window. So light it for them: wherever they point, the room goes warm.
That's the whole pitch, and nobody wrote a word of it.
I want this for my business →Fifty Quid. Because The Free Ones Attract Tourists.
I used to do these free. Ninety of them, near enough.
Here is what I learned. The people who pay nothing turn up, watch their own site move, say “wow, that's brilliant mate”, and are never heard from again. (Some of them showed it to their nephew. Their nephew is now building it badly. God speed.)
So the mockup costs fifty pounds now. And the fifty comes straight off the three hundred.
Here's exactly what your fifty quid buys.
I take the top of your actual site. Your logo, your colours, your words, your product. I build the hero section with the scroll-scrub in it, the same one you have been dragging up and down this page for the last four minutes.
Then I send you a link. You open it on your phone, in the car park, and you watch your own business move.
Not a template. Not a “similar client”. Yours.
And if you hate it, you have lost the price of a takeaway.
That is the whole risk. Fifty pounds. One curry.
If you love it, say so and the £300 package starts, minus your fifty. Three designs pulling in different directions, five rounds of revisions, dropped onto the site you already own. No rebuild. I send you a link for the other £250 and we are off.
If you hate it, that's the end of it. The link stays live for a week so you can show whoever needs to see it, and I'm not chasing you.
Why I would rather have your fifty pounds than your email address.
Because fifty quid means you actually looked at the top of your website and thought “that is costing me money.”
And a man who has thought that is a man I can help. The other sort just wanted to see the trick.
Still Reading? Then You've Got A Question. Ask It.
No form that feeds a CRM. No “a member of our team will respond.” It's me, at the desk, and the desk is where I already am.
Send me the link to your site. One line, that's all I need. I'll look at the top of it and tell you straight whether motion would earn its keep there, and if it wouldn't, I'll tell you that too, because a refund argument is more expensive than honesty.
Put your website address in the message and hit send. That's the whole application process.
1. You send me the link and fifty quid.
2. You get a mockup of it moving, in your brand, your colours.
3. You want it or you don't. Either way you have stopped guessing, and it cost you a curry.
Five mockups a week. I do them in the order they land, and I do every one myself. If it's Thursday when you email, you are probably Monday's. Unless you really are desperate. Then say so in the email.
