Horizontally Scrolling Websites Showcase & Tutorials
Love them or hate them, horizontally scrolling websites are scattered around the net, and there’s some fantastic examples. Unlike the traditional layout of a website that scrolls up and down, horizontal websites flip things around and scroll from left to right. Sometimes they’re enhanced with Javascript to offer an even richer user experience, such as auto-scrolling effects. Check out this collection of 30 inspiring examples, and follow on to a hand full of brilliant tutorials that give an insight into the theory and practice of creating a horizontal site of your own.
The usability of such sites is often questioned, but I personally think they’re great, although one important factor I’d advise considering is to tap into the user’s mouse scrollwheel to enable it to scroll the website horizontally. This is a technique employed by a bunch of the sites in this showcase, and as you’ll find when browsing, it makes them much more usable.
Daniel Stenberg
Farmhouse Fare
Work at Play
Enterro da Gata
Benek Design
Front-End Design Conference
Pixelounge
Frank Giacobbe
Eric Johansson
Carrot Creative
Graphic Evidence
Lucuma
Artist in Design
We Shoot Bottles
Swear Words
Gavin Castleton
Vanity Claire
Synthetic Infatuation
Sursly
Wall Swaps
Contraband
Publicidade Viva
Alex Flueras
Miguel Perez
Richard McCoy
LoveBento
Visuall
Peter Pearson
Hasrimy
Suie Paparude
Dean Oakley
How to Create Your Own Horizontally Scrolling Website
Fancy building a horizontal site of your own? Check out these handy articles and tutorials. Each one offers expert advice on the coding techniques used, and the best practices when considering going the horizontal way.
How To Create a Horizontally Scrolling Site
Create a Vertical, Horizontal and Diagonal Sliding Content Website with jQuery
Create a Horizontal Scrolling Website
Useful tips to design horizontal website layout
Nice round up Chris. The tutorials should be useful
Thanks for the tutorials. These are some of the nicest sites I’ve seen of late. Any idea how building a site like this using jQuery would affect SEO?
Nice collection. Out of these my favorite would be Carrot Creative. The scrolling is smooth and there’s no bottom scrollbar (like some others had).
It’s very2 cool. It feel like we’re walking. lol. I wonder how blog will look like with horizontal scrolling..lol
Great collection! Thank you very much for including the Front-End site :-)
Very nice selection their!
Really great collection, going to look at the tutorials Wednesday, when I have some more time.
hi chris. very nice collection – beautiful inspiration and helpful tutorials. thx. keep on rockin’!
Great collection! How about adding subsetm.com to the list? Built in flash, but fun nonetheless. :)
WOW! You gave me lot of inspirations with this post! Thanks.
P.S. Erick’s J is the funniest and most creative.
Thanks for the feature. There are some really nice designs here. Eric’s site is very cool.
Awesome. Now everyone has wheels on their mouses now and as designers we don’t have to worry about long pages anymore so that people will not get annoyed with scrolling… UNLESS WE DO SOME DUMB ASS THING LIKE MAKE OUR SITE SCROLL THE OTHER WAY!!! Sweet! Now we can annoy everyone again with our avant-garde website design.
@Josh – This is for you! http://bit.ly/1O4uQr
BTW, these sites are awesome. I haven’t seen some of these before. Great job on the roundup Chris!
Another one I was involved with was http://armysarmy.com/. It’s a fun way to interact with a typical site.
@DI: Thank you, may I have another?
It’s really the lack of UI consideration that is the subject of my rant, not the designs. But I guess omeone has to push the envelope. Maybe if there were more of these annoying side-scrollers we would get hardware on our mouses for that too.
There was a time when this was considered wrong, gotta love rule breakers.
Nice article!
Also one website to adding this article: http://www.paritet98.ru/en/
Hey Chris, thanks for listing my site!
I quite like them when done well, as a lot of these example are (hence you included them!).
Great selection! Another good one is Rebecca Ruth Photography.
Very nice and great collection… Very much inspiring!
You rock!! I’ve found horizontal style website for a long time…
You awesome, Thanks a lot!!
Great Collection! Much appreciated.
Thanks for the comments everyone, and a couple of great suggestions here in the comments too!
Going horizontal is surely a great way of “making a diference”. And the sites you picked are design-highlights. BUT: With upcoming netbooks (I use one with resolution of 1024×576) some of them just don’t fit to the screen and a vertical scrollbar appears and even ruins the design. Even in fullscreen view.
Oh cool! Some of these sites have inspired my own website. Check it out and let me know what you think of it. Thanks!
http://squeezeoflimestudio.com
It also uses jQuery for horizontal navigation.
@SiskaFlaurensia
Protest Boardwear’s Collection page (at least the european version) also has horizontal scrolling.
Great post! Never really thought about doing a site this way before! Really love the Lucuma & Peter Pearson designs :)
Really great collection!
Where can i look the tutorials for this works?!I love this examples but i ‘don’t make…
It is a privilege to me that you Chris have mentioned one of my designs (Publicidade Viva) in this post, since I have had you in my Reader since the beginning on Spoon. It gives me power to carry one, as I am out of work at the moment.
TZ
Hahaha. Crazy stuff. I’m also in web design, but never came up to that idea. Horizontal scrolling, excellent!
good tutorial I love this examples but i ‘don’t make…
These sites are awesome, but I’m wondering how this type of one page site effects SEO.
I have tried several times to get clients to buy into this effect – loving it in these examples – great post!
Ryan – Liminal Design
In my opinion it’s more natural than vertical scrollling because our eyes working horizontal, we have horizontal screens and when we are reading magazines and books we’re moving horizontal… I’m also interested in SEO aspect of this solution
Amazing.. This really rocks.. I love Visuall one. Great..
Happy to found such nice collection, it’s Great.
Good to see this collection … I thought I’d take a look and see if it could win we over to designing a website as a side horizontal scroller. Hmm … not sure they did … but very interesting designs ….
Judging from Comments, this was published in November 09. This subject takes on added urgency now that the iPad is coming.
See my post here:
Web Designers: Wake Up And Smell The Touchscreen Coffee!