What I do
Websites built by hand, from a blank file — and the site you're on right now is the pitch. It scrolljacks, and scrolljacking has earned a genuinely bad reputation: sites that take your scroll away and give nothing back. This one hands the controls back — how it moves is your choice, not mine. Keep scrolling — this page is how I fixed it.
The approach
Your scroll.
Your rules.
The bad reputation
Scrolljacking — or scroll hijacking — is when a website overrides your native scroll and decides for itself what happens next. Usability researchers have condemned it for years, and about the usual version they're right: motion you can't predict, a back button that stops working, keyboard users locked out, and animation forced on people who explicitly turned it off.
Most scrolljacked sites break the web to look clever. The look was never the problem — the breakage is, and every bit of it is optional. The full guide to scrolljacking lays out the risks and the six rules that avoid them.
The fix
Every complaint about scrolljacking is really the same complaint: the site took controls you've trusted for twenty years and gave nothing back. Your scroll speed, your back button, your keyboard, your motion settings — all overridden because a designer wanted a moment.
So the fix isn't a lighter touch of the same trick — it's handing the controls back. Wheel, trackpad, touch and arrow keys all do exactly what you'd guess. Every screen is a real page with a real URL: the back button works, any view can be shared or bookmarked, and search engines index all of it. If your system asks for reduced motion, the site quietly stands down to a normal, scrolling website — and the selector in the corner offers you that same choice outright, no settings dig required. Accessibility isn't the fallback here — it's the design.
How I do it
Every action has the expected outcome — or a surprisingly better one.
The Engine
The seamless part is the browser's own View Transitions API. Swapping sections runs a same-document transition; moving between pages runs a cross-document one with the exact same animation — so a page change is visually indistinguishable from a scroll, and the one continuous site you're riding is really seven separate URLs.
No SPA framework, no client-side router, no hydration. Separate, honest HTML pages that happen to feel like one continuous experience — and a browser without the API just loads pages instantly. Nothing breaks.
How view transitions work
Speed
A hand-coded page ships only what it uses. No theme engine, no plugin queue, no render-blocking third parties — the fonts live on this domain, the animation runs in your browser's compositor, and the JavaScript fits in a few kilobytes.
Google measures how fast a page paints and how quickly it responds, and ranks accordingly — this is where the system quietly wins. Nothing loads that isn't doing a job, so there's nothing to wait for: under all the motion, this site scores like a static page, because that's what it is. That is what starting from an empty file buys — and it is why minimalist website design and speed keep turning out to be the same decision.
Why hand-coded
Security
Most hacked websites are hacked through the software around them — a stale plugin, a CMS core that missed an update, a database login. A site built this way isn't sitting on any of that by default. There is no admin panel to brute-force, no plugin stack to keep patched, no database between a visitor and the page.
We host the site and look after it, and if you ever leave you take a copy of your files with you. That's not a ceiling: start from nothing, add only what a project actually needs, and it grows into a CMS, a database, whatever the job calls for. Most sites never need them — and every part you don't ship is a part that can't break.
Start a build
Scrolljacking is when a site intercepts your scroll to drive its own animation — used here to make one continuous experience span real pages, while the page still scrolls the way you expect. The what-is-scrolljacking post explains it fully.
Not if it's built right — this site keeps real, crawlable URLs for every page, so scrolljacking only changes the transition, not what search engines index. See the scrolljacking & SEO post.
Yes — full keyboard navigation, screen-reader-friendly markup, and a complete fallback to normal scrolling for reduced-motion users. See Is scrolljacking bad for accessibility? for the full answer.
Turn on "reduce motion" in your OS or browser, or pick Reduced Motion from the "Choose your experience" menu in the site's navigation — either way the whole site switches to a normal scroll, same content, no animation.
No — it's one motion option, not a house style. Some clients want it, most don't, and it's never used just to be flashy. The build fits the site's actual goals.
It's the browser feature that makes the effect work across real page loads, not just within one page. The view transitions post explains the mechanics.
That's the pitch
Now the
proof.
That's the whole method, and there isn't a secret second half — every site I ship is hand-written HTML, CSS and JavaScript, the same stack this page is built from. If you'd rather see it than read about it, here's what I've built and who builds it. The blog is where I show my work, the FAQ answers the five questions I always get, and the front door is still open. Run an architecture practice? That one is written for you. Want to talk about your site instead? Say hello. Or just keep scrolling — the work is next.
Adam Hoidahl The Better Website
The Better Website is a one-person web design studio in Raleigh, NC, serving the Triangle and clients nationwide. Adam Hoidahl hand-codes every site in plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript — not built on WordPress, a page builder or a CMS.
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