Animations, effects, anything shiny... Let me know... I am looking for inspiration to be honest.
Your page will load slowly; less content is the best for home page especially in SPA
This blog I read just got a fresh redesign. It's simple, elegant, fast, and it looks (and reads) great! josephrex.me
Plus, Joseph Rex is a super cool dude too! You should read some of his blog posts :D
about:blank
Generally the things you listed -- animations, effects, and shiny -- are the antithesis of "best". It's goofy garbage done by artsy types to cover up for a lack of content of value, or by marketing types who don't know enough about the Internet to even tell anyone what should or should not be on a website. It's most always rooted in a "flash over substance, form over functionality" mentality that at the end of the day ends up little more than dumping a can of shellac on a pile; in other words, somebody is polishing a turd.
Such sites failings are only exacerbated by how shoddily coded they usually are, how agonizingly slow they are to load, and that most always they are inaccessible non-semantic gibberish telling large swaths of users to go **** themselves!
See the garbage at places like awwwards, csswinner, and so forth where as pretty and fancy as those sites are, they are universally slow loading poorly coded train wreck laundry lists of how NOT to build a website,
There's a reason I hold up sites like Hashnode, Google, Facebook, and Craigslist as the bleeding edge of PROPER design... where what's REALLY important -- the CONTENT -- takes precedence over some artists spanking it on the screen to try and cover up for a lack of it.
Whilst I go to Awwwards and I would give a 0 rating to damned near every site they feature on usability and accessibility grounds. Particularly when they can't even be properly responsive, have legible colour contrasts, elastic design, or meet even the SIMPLEST of WCAG minimums.
People don't visit websites for the goofy crap you hang around the content, they visit FOR the content. Anything that distracts from or gets in the way of getting to that content is a waste of time, effort, and pisses on usability and accessibility from so on high you'd think the almighty just got back from a kegger.
Brandon
Frontend Developer
The most important parts of a webpage are a clear purpose (ex: sign up now, contact me, download, etc), a clear organization (a button on the front page above and below the fold, without dozens of other parts competing for attention), and a clear reason why someone would want to perform that action (sign up to get thing X, contact me for service Y, download edition Z, etc).