Well, to be honest, I think you're doing yourself a disservice with the elaborate visual design elements.

People have different tastes for sure, but let's take a critical look at the kind of response you got in this thread, just to gauge the effectiveness of your approach:

You got several people who pat you on the back for creating something that looks pretty and impressive. None of them comment on the content, or give any sign they actually read it. I would say you failed to reach these people.

You got several people who say it looks good, and promise to return to read it later. Maybe they will, maybe they won't. I'm a cynic by nature, so my money is on the latter. People are lazy and fickle, and if they don't find the energy to look at a thing NOW, chances are they won't return to do it later either. I'd say you failed to reach these people too.

You got ONE person who appreciated the eye candy AND took the trouble to read it, AND then returned to discuss the topic. This is someone you communicated with successfully!

And lastly, you got ONE person (myself), who is interested in the topic, but who bailed out the second he saw text sliding in from the left. Because this made him assume (from experience with similar eye candy heavy sites) the site would be annoying to use, and likely an exercise in superficial form over depth of content anyway. You failed to reach this person too, in spite of the fact he was both interested AND willing to put in effort (proven by the amount of feedback he is willing to provide).

In all, your net caught one fish so far. Maybe a couple more will come later, but it's not a stellar return on the obviously great effort you put into this.

My recommendation to you, is to think differently about design in future projects.

Good Design = form follows function. It can be pretty and visually engaging, but always only in service to usability and content delivery, NEVER just to look impressive.

Bad Design = form over function. This is when things are made to look good and engage the senses, but at a cost in usability.

Sliding elements are visually distracting and tiring. Use them VERY sparingly, if at all. And sliding text is especially bad, since it's much harder for the eyes to lock on to and actually read.

I'll give you an example of the kind of design ethos you should avoid. The game Osu is a challenging music game where you click on stuff to the beat. But it's the obnoxious game interface I want to showcase here. Take a look at just the first seconds of this gameplay video (you can view it in slow motion to see all the detail I'll talk about more clearly):



Notice how the top level game menu works.

There's a big pulsing circle with Osu printed on it.

The circle slides to the left, and menu choices slide out of it to the right. When you hover over the menu choices, they change color, slide further to the right, and vibrate for a second.

All of that movement makes the game look cool and full of action, but it hardly helps readability. This isn't a big problem in the top level menu, since there are few choices, and you'll quickly memorize which one you need to select, so you don't need to read them every time.

Much worse is the second and third level menu that follows, where you select a difficulty, and then select a song by scrolling through a list of potentially thousands of entries.

You don't see the endless scroll nightmare here, because this player is replaying a song, so the game quickly and automatically scrolls to it. But you can see that the menu items slide around like mad when you hover over them. This makes it very hard to read them, and here you really do need to read them to find the one you're looking for.

This is bad design, impairing usability for the sake of looking cool.

Now if you stop and think about it, Usu is a COMPUTER GAME. It is basically a glorified "Skinner Box". It is a piece of software that is designed to manipulate people into playing by stimulating their senses. It makes sense for a game to attempt to hack your brain with stimulating visuals, because that's actually the entire point of a game - hypnotizing you with flashy sensory input, so you can be turned into a human vegetable that can be milked for profit. That's what games are all about!

But this same design ethos is kind of counterproductive when you're making a web site with deep intellectual information. When you want to wake people up, not lull them to sleep, then you must engage their intellect, and NOT their reptile brain.

You are using the kind of design ethos that lulls people to sleep. The reason so many people say it looks cool, but don't comment on the actual content, is because you hypnotized them with eye candy. And that shuts off the neocortex and engages the reptilian limbic system. The opposite of what you want, since you're not out to make a buck here!

Perhaps now you'll see why I'm taking the time to tell you all this. I'm on your side! I applaud your effort to wake up people, and I wish to see you succeed in doing just that!