How to Create an Interactive Website – 17 Simple Strategies

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Learn how to create an interactive website to help you achieve your marketing goals and grow as a brand.

Engage and Encourage Website Visitors

Interactive websites are great tools for engaging your customers and increasing your conversions. Knowing how to create an interactive website can help you achieve your marketing goals and grow as a brand.

The best websites are designed with users in mind. Interactive websites are particularly successful at user-centered design. They are not only personalized and playful — they also give users control over their experience and help guide them toward the information they want.

Interactive websites encourage visitors to scroll, click on navigation items, view portfolio items, and participate in other ways. The result is a more engaged and memorable user experience.

But first, let’s look at what an interactive website is and the advantages of creating an interactive website.

What is an Interactive Website?

An interactive website is simply a site that promotes interactions with users.

Rather than a traditional website that is more of an information provider with basic choices like “click” or “learn more,” an interactive website encourages communication and engagement with visitors through interactive elements.

An interactive website is more exciting and engaging for your audiences, encouraging them to interact and return to your site.

What are the Elements of an Interactive Website?

You can add many different elements to your website or online store. Here are a few of the most common:

  • Interactive infographics
  • Virtual reality overlays
  • Animations
  • Quizzes
  • Calculators
  • Maps
  • Surveys
  • Polls
  • Assessments
  • Interactive ebooks
  • Webinars and classes
  • Training courses
  • Games
  • Interactive timelines
  • 360 videos

When you add these types of interactive elements to your website, you offer more opportunities for a customer to be able to enjoy their time on your site.

What are the Advantages of an Interactive Website?

There are many different advantages that an interactive website can bring to your brand.

First and foremost is that an interactive website creates higher levels of engagement with your audiences.

That allows you to find more opportunities to engage and communicate with your audiences, increasing your chances of converting new website visitors.

That helps encourage more action-taking and time spent on your website.

Another key benefit is the increase in your conversion rates.

When users spend more time on your website, they are more likely to take critical actions and move down your marketing and sales funnels.

That also significantly impacts your bounce rate and your SEO rankings.

Interactive websites also improve your brand awareness and your brand reach.

What Makes a Good Interactive Website?

An interactive website is memorable and exciting for customers. When you can garner interest in your brand through the interactivity on your website, you can become much more attractive to customers and encourage returning businesses and visitors.

The final significant advantage of an interactive website is the personalization that it can create.

An interactive website that uses calculators or quizzes can create unique results and experiences that make customers feel like individuals for your brand.

That helps encourage return purchases and brand loyalty.

How to Create an Interactive Website

Creating an interactive website requires you to pick suitable types of interactive elements and incorporate them into your website strategy and planning.

By carefully thinking through your options and selecting options that fit your brand, you can improve your chances of engaging with audiences and increasing the number of conversions you receive.

1. Think Through Design

The design of your website is one of the essential factors for adding interactivity to your website strategy.

Knowing how to make an interactive website revolves around understanding the best design styles to emphasize your brand and the message you want to send.

You need to ensure that visitors find your website entertaining and engaging from their first impression.

2. Improve your Site’s Personalization

Interactive design helps you personalize your site to your audience’s tastes. For example, you can track interactive actions on your site, like when someone plays your video or shares your article on social media.

Because you can track your users’ interactions, you’ll be able to test which interactive elements work and which don’t — allowing you to hone in on the perfect personalization elements.

3. Create a Loading Animation

Loading animations are a great way to immediately capture and keep the user’s attention. Not only do they reassure users that the page is loading, but they can also show off your brand personality and delight users.

Many loading animations will indicate how long it will take for the page to load, making the waiting time seem shorter and making users less likely to bounce.

4. Leverage Hover Animations

Another type of animation that can delight your visitors is hover animations. For example, when a user hovers over an animated element like a button, it can change color, grow, shrink, rotate, and more, depending on how you coded it.

Like loading animations, hover animations are enjoyable for visitors and assure them that your site is working.

5. Rethink Navigation

Like swiping, hamburger menus are another common mobile/app design trend that has made its way onto desktop websites. Even if the hamburger icon itself is not present, users are generally familiar with the idea that the navigation does not need to be prominent at all times.

Users know that it’s there and that they can interact with it when needed. Hiding the menu can give the rest of the web page space to breathe, and at the same time, the menu’s reveal is yet another interactive web design opportunity.

6. Make Scrolling Fun

You want to make it fun for users to browse your site and discover your content. Scrolling patterns can help. Let’s briefly go over the most popular options below:

  • Horizontal scrolling: This scrolling pattern allows the user to scroll left and right to reveal content from the sides of the window or container — instead of up and down, which is a more traditional orientation.
  • Infinite scroll: With this type of long scrolling, content continually loads once a user reaches the bottom of the page. Pinterest is one of — if not the — most well-known sites for using this scrolling pattern.
  • Parallax scrolling: This scrolling pattern creates an illusion of depth. Some elements are either fixed in place or set to scroll slower, while others on the page scroll normally. This effect makes it look like some parts move in front of others, simulating 3D movement.

7. Utilize Micro-Interactions

When it comes to animation in interactive web design, the small movements are what sell it. And when you consider that the purpose of a website’s animation is often feedback (like letting the user know what they can and can’t interact with or whether they’ve done the right thing), it makes sense that this feedback works best on a subconscious level.

Animations that draw too much attention can distract the user. This distraction is where micro-interactions come in.

8. Add Chatbots

A strong customer support team is more important now than ever before. Consumers expect business owners and marketers to understand their needs and actively work to solve their problems.

It’s imperative to tackle this issue because 51% of customers said they would not shop with a brand again after a poor support experience.

For instance, chatbots can handle specific common questions if programmed correctly. You can teach your chatbot to help customers reset their passwords, personalize the content they receive from you in their email, etc.

These bots’ quick responses to consumers with a simple question can drastically improve your conversion rate and on-site engagement.

9. Publish User-Generated Content

Let people interact with you directly by incorporating user-generated content on your website. Doing this signals that people’s time and effort at contributing are appreciated and valued, incentivizing them to engage with you even more. As a result, they’ll share more of your content, buy more of your products, and turn into your brand advocates.

There are several ways to display user-generated content on your website, including writing articles based on comments from your blog and showcasing social media posts and images of customers with your products.

Be sure to encourage your site visitors to submit their user-generated content and make it easy for them to do so.

10. Incorporate Interactive Video

Since many users are more likely to play, share, and otherwise interact with videos than text, incorporating interactive videos like a 360 experience or interactive images and animations is an easy and effective way to make your website interactive. It can also help boost conversions.

83% of video marketers say video has helped them generate leads.

11. Add Quizzes, Surveys, and Polls

Encourage people to interact with your website through online surveys and quizzes.

People love quizzes and usually don’t mind taking a minute to fill one out. Plus, it will help decrease your website bounce rate since they’ll be on your site for longer, and if you ask for their email before revealing the results, you’ve got a bonus way of growing your email list.

12. Host an Online Giveaway

Online giveaways are a great way to harness the power of social media while building more meaningful interactions on your website. You can use these events to build your email list, spread brand awareness, or increase your website traffic.

The key is understanding what kind of strategy you should use when creating your content.

When it comes time to pick a prize, you can choose something from your storefront, offer store credit or a special discount, or pick something everyone can use, like an Amazon gift card.

13. Use Gamification

Gamification is a psychological trick that website owners and marketers use to improve the interactiveness of their sites and increase conversions.

Combining the fun of a game with the lead-generating magic of an opt-in or coupon opt-in form makes your site more fun. Of course, people will want to see what happens when they spin the discount wheel, but they’ll only find out once they enter their email.

14. Add Animated Elements

Animated elements are great ways to increase engagement and improve customer experiences.

Dynamic scrolling, hover-triggered pop-ups and changes, 3D effects, and even different cursor images can make your website more engaging from the first interaction a customer has.

It also helps your customers get a feel for the new design of the website by being able to play around with different effects and environments.

15. Find Areas to Begin Adding in Elements

Adding interactive elements doesn’t mean you need to redesign your entire site with a new scrolling experience and many animations.

You can start small and begin by adding interactive elements that don’t drastically change the style of your site.

Adding a calculator to help a customer understand costs or a quiz that identifies an issue is a significant first step.

16. Make it Mobile-Friendly

Often when envisioning an interactive website, we focus on the desktop experience.

However, the majority of website visitors will come from a mobile device. Therefore, your interactive elements need to be adaptable to a mobile screen.

If you build a responsive design for your interactivity, you can entertain users on any device. However, without making your site accessible on mobile, you can risk losing your customer’s interest.

17. Don’t Forget About Page Speed and SEO

Adding interactive elements can sometimes reduce your page speed.

Ensuring that you monitor your page speed and ensure that your interactive elements aren’t slowing your site down is essential.

You also want to make sure that your SEO isn’t negatively affected. For example, if your site is highly dependent on content for SEO, getting rid of text content for a video might not be the best option.

Becoming Interactive is Essential!

As more websites pop up online, customer interactions become increasingly valuable to business owners. As a result, we expect to see a surge in businesses trying new techniques to get consumers to interact with their content.

Now that you know some of the best ways to make your website more interactive, you can start implementing these tactics as a part of your strategy. You’ll go through trial and error as you split test your contact forms, hammer out details with your chatbot, and build online contests.

Like most things, you’ll get better at encouraging customers to stay on your site and engage with your brand with practice. The most critical step is understanding your target audience and getting started by adding interactive content to your website. We can help!

We Build Interactive Websites

Are you interested in building an interactive website? Our team will be happy to help you with this. But first, look at our portfolio and read our case studies. You can also discover interactive elements on this website.

Then, if you believe we are a good fit for web design needs, let’s talk! We offer a full range of consulting and design solutions for businesses and product brands.

If you are unsure how to create an interactive website, let’s talk. Our team can help you understand the benefits

Is Your Website Interactive?

Do you have anything to add to our suggestions for creating an interactive website? Perhaps you have a strategy that helped you increase user satisfaction and engagement.

Please leave your comments below so our audience can benefit and grab our feed so you don’t miss our next post! And help your associates to make their online presence interactive by sharing these tips with them!

Thank you! We appreciate your help in ending bad business websites, one pixel at a time!

By Gregor Saita
Co-Founder / CXO
@gregorsaita