Quick note: I link to a template I sell near the end of this. The story above it stands on its own either way.)
I spent a week building a website template. Not for a client. For nobody, really — just because I wanted to see if I could make one detail work.
Here’s the detail: a small circular gauge in the corner of the screen. As you scroll, it fills up and the number inside counts up with it. Scroll back up, it winds back down. It’s not a video. It’s not a pre-baked animation. It’s tied directly to your scroll position, live.
That’s it. That’s the whole idea I was chasing.
Why I cared about one gauge so much
Most “cinematic” templates fake it. Dark background, a fade-in here, a parallax layer there — and underneath, it’s still just a regular page in a costume.
I wanted one thing on the page that actually reacted to you. Not decoration. A response.
It took three tries to get right
First version: a timed animation. Press scroll, watch it play. Looked great in my test. Fell apart the second I scrolled faster or slower than I’d planned for — because it wasn’t actually listening to me, it was just running on its own clock next to me.
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Second version: I tried to fix that by linking the same animation to scroll progress. Better, but it always felt half a step behind, like dragging a rock through water.
Third version — the one that shipped — I stopped trying to animate it at all. No animation library doing the work. The scroll position is the gauge value, directly. No smoothing, no easing fighting the input. Just: wherever you are on the page, that’s where the gauge is.
Sounds obvious now. Took two wrong versions to get there.
What else is in the page
The gauge is the part I’m proud of. The rest is there to support it, not compete with it:
A scroll-pinned story sequence — four short chapters instead of one long scroll
Cards that tilt slightly toward your mouse, so the page still responds to you outside the scroll sequence
A macro photo gallery — because a launch page that never shows the details doesn’t earn the word “premium”
One HTML file. No build step. No framework. Open it, it works.
If you’re solving the same problem
If you’ve ever tried to sync UI to scroll and had it feel disconnected from the actual input — the timed-animation trap I fell into twice — I’d genuinely like to hear how you solved it. Drop it in the comments.
And if you want to see the gauge doing its thing rather than take my word for it, here’s the live demo: raven-5a231.netlify.app
Full source, ready to customize, is on Gumroad — 20% off with code 728: jawadaliyour.gumroad.com/l/wmbber/728
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