Animation is one of the best ways to captivate, engage and convert your users through your website. These small animations pack a heavy punch when it comes to representing your company/brand online. Animated graphics give your text, images and other elements a charm to interact and invite users to your company’s products and services. A website that is absent of animations is as good as a bucket without a bottom in today’s technology centric web world. Although some animations are written from scratch by developers, others need fast and ready to implement solutions that can generate custom animation codes for their web design. But which types of websites can be animated? Better yet, which tools and web apps are ideal for your website to get the exact solution you are suitable for your design and theme? Custom websites are developed in three major coding languages namely CSS, JavaScript and HTML5. If you need to get personalized animation for these websites, you must have their code specific tools to animate your elements. In this article we will share the most useful and effective custom animation tools, web apps and open source libraries that developers can benefit from and bring about almost any animation they need in their website.
CSS
First off we have CSS website. Any individual who is looking for CSS animations needs creative and agile development to create graphical motions that lives up to the mark. Modern CSS animations are no longer a hectic task that takes days or weeks to complete. With these 5 tools you can easily integrate an elegant and aspiring animation for almost any element in your web design.
CSS Hero Animator
CSS Hero Animator plugin comes as the newest edition to the arsenal. Already winning the likes of many developers and graphic designers, this tool allows you to animate website page content from banners, icons, images, loaders, and other elements without breaking a sweat. For WordPress users this tool is a gift from heaven since it completely free and offers a comprehensive list of features they require for carrying out their daily animation tasks. All you need to do is select which part of the content or elements you need to animate, and then personalize their timing, speed and animation according to the user preferences.
CSS Animate
CSS animate is one of the most popular animation tools you can get. Why this tool is becoming a sensation among designers is because of its easy to use functionalities and animation codes generated by key frames for the website. What’s more to it is you can add a variety of animation details in the code such as opacity, scale, time duration and the element position. To personalize the animation with your preferences, you can play/pause the animation any time of your choosing and view editing markers through the timeline panel. But unlike CSS Hero Animate, designers need some ‘know how’ in order to produce a good animation from it. It’s a free to download Animation tool so anyone can get their hand on it.
Stylie
This tool is very and unlike most CSS animation applications, Stylie does not require any prior knowledge to create code. It comes with a truck load of features to generate bespoke animations for various elements of your website. Since it is an open source tool, you don’t have to compromise the quality of the design as you make an alteration in the code. With so much to offer, you can get it free and watch tutorials on YouTube to get a better grip on this animation software.
Cubic Bezier Generator
If your getting started right away, then Cubic Bezier methods can be a little tricky for a novice. Being a detail rich animation generator for CSS websites, Cubic Bezier Generator helps designers by giving them all the features and functionalities to design and implement a custom animation built on Bezier curve. You can either create your own animation by dragging the Bezier handles, or go for default animations from its catalog. It’s a versatile tool that serves beginners, as well as experts to creating CSS transition animations for better user appeal and interaction.
Angry Tools Animation Kit
You get a personalized code built from scratch with the help of defined animation presets with Angry Tools Animation Kit. It gives designers access to all basic animation properties such as timing duration, position, delays, intervals and other cool aspects of a custom animation design. Designers can view their work and edits through a live preview window for better performance. You can also get code output windows for CSS code for fast and nifty animation development through copy and pasting of the code.
JavaScript
JavaScript is among the most feared and admired web development languages. It creates engaging platforms that leaves visitors in awe, landing a lasting impression and bringing them back for more. But JavaScript is not just limited to websites. It is also used for creating scrolling abilities, APIs, Games and much more. As of today, the internet is crammed with animation and design applications and tools that can be used to bring life into your website. But which Applications can sit well with your requirements? Here are 5 JS tools and libraries that you can incorporate to build some luxurious and detail rich animations for your website.
KUTE.js
KUTE.js is a top performance JavaScript animation engine. Equipped with modular code and memory efficiency, KUTE.js is super fast in code execution and outstanding in animation preferences. Being prefix free, KUTE.js is able to detect whether the user’s browser requires prefix while utilizing it for transform. It gives you the facility of using these utilities buy yourself within your plugins and applications. It also compatible with all browsers so you don’t need to worry about animations working in one browser and failing in the other. KUTE.js enables designers to produce tweens and chainable tweens. This gives you full spectrum tween control methods such as start/stop and pause/resume. Full of options and features, you get easing functions, utility functions and color convertors etc.
JustGage
A handy JavaScript plugin for animating nice and clean gauges, JustGage is based on on Raphaël library for vector drawing which makes is entirely self-adjusting and resolution independent. Another great feature about this application is that it is compatible with almost every browser from Chrome, IE6+, Safari, Firefox, Android and Opera etc.
BounceJS
BounceJS is a personal favorite for creating custom animations. You can add the library into your website and then get the animation started since the file exists separately. It allows designers to produce rawJS codes in the most user friendly means possible, and gives welcoming reception by displaying several bouncing animations when you open the application. BounceJS is famous for its sticky style animation that bounces very vividly, creating an alluring appeal for users when they interact with your website.
Mojs
As an open source and robust retina ready JavaScript library, Mojs offers simple, fast and modular features to draw motion graphics for your websites. Animate shapes, icons, loaders, banners and other boring elements into cool animation to attract users and bring them to your landing pages.
SVG
SVG is one of the fastest and effective ways to create and develop interactive and resolution-independent animations that reflect quality graphics. This allows the animation element to look great on almost any screen size. Besides that, the Snap.svg JavaScript library enables you to work with your SVG assets just as jQuery makes working with the DOM. Equipped with modern features to run on all browsers, Snap.svg supports the newest features like clipping, masking, patterns, groups, full gradients and much more.
HTML5
If you want your website dynamic, actionable, encouraging and engaging for your target audience, then HTML5 is your guy. Short for Hypertext Markup Language, HTML5 is the latest version of this jargon and very popular in today’s online industry. But what makes HTML5 outstanding when it comes to aesthetics? While HTML5 has won the hearts of many web developers, it also offers awesome animation applications to customize the website elements just the way a graphic designer wants.
Animatron
An exceptionally good animation application, Animatron allows you to produce all kinds of animations for your HTML5 websites to leverage your visual elements and make it look professional. One of the best things about this app is its storytelling animation feature allows you to create interactive presentations with high details. You can insert images, audio and video elements in several formats to customize your animations.
Maqetta
Simple, free and browser compatible, Maqetta is an open source app with built-in WYSIWYG visual authoring of HTML5 user interfaces. Since Maqetta itself is authored in HTML, it doesn’t require any additional plugins or downloads to run. Your animated elements will run smoothly without any compromise on all browsers including Chrome, IE6+, Safari, Firefox, Android and Opera.
HTML5 Maker
Packed with all popular text filters and a large collection of images, HTML5 Maker is an online free animation editor for experts as well as novices. You don’t need to use any Photoshop for creating cool text as its integrated filters will take care of it. This allows you can manipulate their properties and create amazing Instagram-like effects when using them in your projects. With HTML5 Maker you can create animations with amazing transitions with full control over them.
Google Web Designer 
Create engaging and attractive HTML5 based animations and motions graphics for all sorts of screens sizes, browsers and devices with Google Web Designer. It comes with ‘Quick’ and ‘Advanced’ animation modes. Quick mode allows you to build your animations scene by scene and leave the frame adjustment to the app. In Advanced mode, you can utilize layers and change the location of elements in the stack to animate elements individually.
Hippo Animator
Hippo Animator creates good looking animations with its simple to use interface and powerful features. It doesn’t matter if you are a beginner or an expert, Hippo Animator helps you to build custom animations using vector graphics. You don’t need any prior knowledge of scripting, easy as that. Build on javascript engine, Hippo Animator can add MP4, Vimeo and YouTube videos to your animations. All you need a line of code and the animation will be added to your web pages. As a cross browser compatible app, you HTML animation will run smoothly on every browser as well as device without the need of any browser plugins or downloads. With the help of its built in image editor, you can quickly add changes and run the animation in real-time. You can also create slideshows by using the fade or slide between images, image viewer object, control the show using script commands, load large images after the movie has loaded, pause and go back and forward.
