Even those who've retired from poking around shops or roaming malls – adopting a strictly online-only shopping method – still want a taste of that immersive element of brick-and-mortar browsing, but it's a craving no static website can satiate. 

The good news: Online shopping does not have to be a cold and clinical activity thanks to tools and tech that enable brands to build dynamic, animated, and interactive digital content.

The bad news: Oftentimes the creative minds gifted with the ability to ideate shopping experiences that capture customers and conversions are not also the technical minds working with the tools needed to bring those ideas to customers' screens.

In this blog, we'll talk about the technology behind the web's most powerful graphic content, why it's not widely known or used, and how Fastr Frontend is making it accessible to non-technical ecommerce teams wanting to breathe movement and life into their frontends.

What is WebGL?

Graphic content and websites are usually built with a combination of HTML and CSS. And there's a whole lot you can do with that... but not anything and everything.

Enter WebGL (aka Web Graphics Library): A web-based API that helps build interactive 2D and 3D graphics. If you're not a software engineer, don't get lost in the sauce. Stick with us, hear this perfectly succinct summary, and keep reading – this blog post truly is for you, not your devs...

The Ecommerce Technology Gap & The Bridge

If you're thinking, "That's cool, but not my wheelhouse." We get it, there's a disconnect here.

"There's a big gap between the people who can do it and the people who directly benefit from it. Everyone who's a designer, marketer, creative would love to be able to do what WebGL can... But developers – who would work on that technology – most times don't even know it exists. And the developers who have that capability probably aren't e-commerce marketers."

Ryan Breen, Chief Technology Officer, Fastr 

And that gap extends far beyond this fancy-sounding WebGL stuff. The frontend-building process has long since been a notoriously slow-motion one thanks to the push of creative teams and pull of technical teams. It's just too many cooks in the kitchen.

Actually, let's roll with the kitchen analogy...

• Your brand = the restaurant: Super-competitive industry, many different teams and moving parts, and the ultimate goal is to get customers in the front door, to stay a while, to eat, drinks, and be merry enough to return.

• Your backend = the kitchen (aka back-of-house): The place that the dining experience is constructed and your developers are cooking up a storm while trying to juggle multiple priorities, endless meal chits, and requests from the front-of-house staff.

• Your frontend = the dining room (aka front-of-house): It's where the brand tone is set and both the entire dining operation and customer experience come to life under the watchful eyes of marketing, merchandising, design, and content teams.

• The problem: Your creative teams have the most insight into the dining experience and know the menu options, ingredients, promos and specials, patrons, and how all of these things interact. They see what works, what doesn't, and what needs to happen in the back-of-house to make for a more prosperous front-of-house. But they have highly limited kitchen access and can only voice their thinking to the cooks, hope it's understood, and pray they execute in a timely manner. 

And how do you bridge this gap? The Fastr team doesn't just know what and where that bridge is, we built it.

See, Fastr Frontend revolutionizes the entire ecommerce operation by enabling brands to politely escort developers out of the kitchen and give their creative teams complete culinary command: Full frontend control without code or dev handoffs that snuff out creative agility and with a huge menu of frontend capabilities.

...But today, we're focusing on a new menu feature – Graphic Animations, cooked in a WebGL broth, plated with bottomless customizations, and served in the form of a library of design templates that are easily digestible for ecommerce creatives with an appetite for elevated frontend design. 

"We're taking a technology that is criminally underutilized and we're making it accessible to a broader audience. You can pop a template into your account and all of a sudden you're creating something that anywhere else in the world would be a month's worth of work. It's really cool when you can find a technology that's that powerful and turn it into something that could be self-service."

Ryan Breen, Chief Technology Officer, Fastr 

Graphic Animation Templates, Served

ICYMI: Fastr Frontend recently released a whole slew of flexible, customizable design templates – carousels, quickviews, PLPs, quizzes, countdown timers, and icons – which you have to check out.

But we also packaged up a library of Graphic Animation templates to put ecommerce teams and their frontends into motion. Hit play on the clip below to see a quick demonstration from our recent Design Lab.

But this is just the initial release; it's just the beginning...

The Full Story & The Road Ahead

With a name like Fastr, you know we're not resting. Our team is taking customer requests and working on more templates to fuel users' ability to build increasingly immersive, engaging digital content – with increasing speed and ease. 

"We're picking high value starting points where nobody's looking at a blank canvas and trying to figure out how the heck to WebGL shader code. And we're going to create new ones very frequently and build that library. Everybody's going to get to play without having to become developers of a pretty niche technology."

Ryan Breen, Chief Technology Office, Fastr

Here's a taste of what we've got on our minds and in the oven: Text animation, click effects, animated logos, 3D backgrounds, elevated parallax effects, 3D product views and placements... just to name a few.

We've built the foundation, we've got all of the home-grown ingredients, we're inspired to keep cooking, and we sure hope you're hungry.

Watch our Design Lab workshop for a closer look at Fastr Frontend and its new Libraries & Templates. And if you're ready to experience unprecedented speed and control, submit your request for a free Fastr Frontend test drive below...