In a world where we are experiencing things like Virtual Reality and Metaverse, you can easily guess the importance of interactivity. Digital platforms including websites are prioritizing interactive experiences like never before. Talking about interactive websites, it’s something that automates the visitors’ experience into a more immersive one. The more it’s immersive, the more engagement.
But what makes a website interactive? The website is considered interactive when it communicates with users by allowing them to do more activities. While a captivating website requires clicking and scrolling for a more engaging experience, it also has to be visually amusing and collaborative to be able to hold users’ attention.
Now the question is how to make an interactive website. This article has the answer for you. Here we’ll find out how you can make interactive websites using some of the most popular website-building technologies and platforms. Let’s start!
Why Interactive Website Is a Must in 2023?
Before we move into the technical aspects of interactive website building, let’s see why you must be adopting this trend. Well, it’s mainly about meeting future challenges for your website, hence your business.
Engaging interactives can put an end to the age-old monotonous experience. It brings a novelty allowing the visitors to actively poke and prod to uncover most about your site. Besides, user interaction has become a defining factor to call a website good or bad.
From the business perspective, more interactivity means more user engagement, more engagement means more traffic, and more traffic means more revenue! The stats say the ‘self-service’ capacity websites are currently the growing ones. Some of the other reasons you need an interactive website for include:
- Providing customers with a more captivating experience about the business
- Increasing conversion rates
- Improving personalization
- Increasing site authority in Google
- Achieving competitive advantage
- Earning more organic backlinks for SEO and benefitting other SEO campaigns
- Providing more information about the business in less time
- Creating a long-lasting visual impression
Elements of an Interactive Website
To create an interactive website, you need to bear some important elements in your mind. These elements are necessary and help to make a website interactive for its visitors. An interactive website can increase the engagement of your website and boost the conversion rate. Let’s find out then.
1. Consider the Website Design
There is a saying, the first impression is the last impression, and this thing is measured by the look of an object. For example, if you are going through an area that has aesthetic structures that can attract you more rather than normal structures, the same thing goes for a website. A unique and best design style can attract audiences more. So, while you’re going to make an interactive website, provide a unique and attractive design.
2. Adjust Page Speed
An interactive website is full of heavy elements that can slow down the page load speed and as a result, it’ll be hard for an audience to crawl. If your website has a slower page speed, your conversion rate will suffer, and a website with a slower speed gets the most visitors since they prefer a load time of fewer than three seconds. For this reason, you need to maintain the page loading speed. According to the experts, if the page speed increase by 1 second, the conversion rate increase by 7%.
3. Responsive According to the Device
Most users use a mobile phone as their primary research device and for surfing the internet. The rest of them use tablets and desktops for their internet surfing. While you are developing a website, make sure it is responsive to every device. According to experts, 52% of people do not engage with a company if it is not a responsive one.
Responsive websites can attract more audiences, as a result, 67% of them are more likely to buy from those websites. According to research, a responsive website has increased its sales by 62%.
4. Simple Navigation
On a website, some specific portions need to be clear and simple. Navigation is one of them. When an audience can, easily navigate the website, easy to use the navigation menu, and can find the desired thing quicker; then they tend to visit that website more.
As a result, simplify the navigation and provide a simple navigation menu. You can also use internal links, which make it easier to access extra relevant content. Some websites have everything connected to a product or information, but they are difficult to locate, so people leave and go to another website to find that information. Internal links can boost your website’s stay time and make it more user-friendly.
5. Images and Videos
Images and videos can attract more than normal text. You can add images or videos to content and it makes that thing more understandable to users. You can use images to make catalogs, slideshows, etc. for your content or items. If you provide videos with a review of a product, troubleshooting problems, usage of a gadget, etc. then it’ll attract the audience more and the audience loves a website that helps them to gather adequate information about their searched object. You can also use GIFs.
6. Forms, Feedback, and Buttons
Providing a form on a website means you allow an audience to contact you directly. This thing improves the communication between the website owner and the audience. When an audience gets their questions answered and help from a website, they prefer them most to use in near future and suggest people around them to use that site, a free promotion, right?
Feedback is another one, when a new audience will arrive and find out the website is friendly, easy, informative, and attractive by seeing the feedback, they dig in and do their work without any hesitation. Also, you can get their suggestion through their feedback and improve your website, so it’s a win-win thing for you.
Another one is buttons. Providing buttons can help the audiences to find out about your social activities, your blogs, your YouTube channel, and many more. A button can help the audience to share things on the social media platform and that’ll be a free promotion of your site.
7. Consider Animated Element
When an audience comes across your website and sees animated things, they get attracted there. Animated things always attract every aged people without any doubt. This thing can increase audience engagement and can improve their experience. You can provide dynamic scrolling, can change the shape of the cursor, or can implement hover animations to change the cursor design, use scroll effects for images or the background of the website, etc.
How to Create an Interactive Website Using WordPress
The first platform or tool that requires our attention for making an interactive website is WordPress. It’s the most popular and robust tool to build websites. We’ll find out more about it here.
What is WordPress?
WordPress immediately strikes your mind when you think of website-making tools. It’s a Content Management System that allows you to create and manage the widest range of websites including business websites, blogs, eCommerce stores, personal sites, etc. There’re tons of apps and plugins that can be integrated into this platform to create whatever kind of website you like.
Why Is WordPress So Popular?
1 out of every 3 websites in the world is built with WordPress. Yes, it’s that popular! It’s a free and open-source platform to get started with website making. WordPress comes with a massive collection of built-in features and applications that one can use to extend the site. Besides, it’s easy to use and doesn’t require any coding knowledge. This is a highly flexible and secure platform and has large community support.
How to Create Interactive Website with WordPress
The days for just-text-format are long gone and the good news is it’s been easier with the WordPress platform to make an interactive website with its captivating themes and interactive plugins. Let’s find out how!
Responsive Theme
Stats show that responsiveness increases the visitors’ engagement time on the site. It refers to the flexibility of web content to fit different screen sizes. So your visitors can have an interactive experience regardless of their device type. You can choose from a wide range of free or paid responsive themes in WordPress. Moreover, you can customize one on your own.
Add Quiz and Poll Plugin
Moz and BuzzSumo say that quizzes and polls make the most shared online content. WP offers great plugins to create engaging quizzes, opinion polls, and personality tests. Some of the plugins you can add to your site include Riddle, SurveyFunnel, Apester Interactive Content, and so on.
Embed Plugin to Create User-Generated Content
Integrating user-generated content will allow the users to contribute to the site’s content and get them emotionally attached. With WP, you can easily do this with a plugin called Listly that allows creating of curated blog posts. You can also incorporate a Q&A section with different Q&A plugins like WP Answers, DW Question & Answer, etc.
Solicit Rating, Feedback, and Gamification
Asking website visitors to post feedback and rating is always a great way to interact. Getting feedback using emoticons can make it more engaging. To solicit ratings and feedback, you’ll get some great rating plugins in WordPress. Feedback plugins by Vicomi and FL3R FeelBox are the most popular ones to add to your site.
You can also add gamification and reward systems with plugins like ‘Achievements’ and ‘Captain Up’. These plugins will offer badges, challenges, and reward points which will encourage users to share content and rate them. TripAdvisor is an excellent example that embeds gamification.
Integrate Chat Option
An interactive website will remain incomplete without a chat function. You can enable private messaging on your site with a plugin called UserPro. It’ll allow users to send messages, receive notifications, and view conversations. Chat by WPmudev is another popular plugin to enjoy the service.
Add Interactive Media Elements
Visitors love playing with some interactive elements on your site. You can make them read a PDF book, magazine, or portfolio by turning it into a 3D Flipbook. The Real 3D FlipBook is a great plugin for that.
You can also add interactive images, videos, and music to your site. Image Hotspotter is an excellent plugin to turn your website into a gallery. You can also add board games or memory games with the popular WP plugin H5P.
3 Highly Interactive Websites Created Using WordPress
Let’s take a look at some example websites created with WordPress. These are:
The official Star Wars Blog (www.starwars.com/news): It’s probably the best example of an interactive website made with WordPress. This premium blog site uses a custom theme and plugins like WP jQuery Lightbox, Panopress, Disney DoubleClick, W3 Total Cache, WPML, and so on. It’s a total fun paradise to explore the best episodes, games, applications, news, etc.
The Walt Disney Company (www.thewaltdisneycompany.com): You can pay a visit to the virtual Disney world made with WordPress. It’s a magnificent site made with a custom theme by Disney Interactive and plugins like WP-PageNavi, User Role Editor, W3 Total Cache, Disney Analytics, Regenerate Thumbnails, etc. It makes you lose yourself with the new and returning characters.
TechCrunch (www.techcrunch.com): It’s the world’s top technology blog powered by WordPress with a minimalistic and interactive design. The best thing about this site isn’t the style but the speed and exemplary performance that keeps readers engaged. Made with a custom theme, TechCrunch includes some famous plugins including Akismet, Jetpack, WP Importer, etc.
How to Create an Interactive Website with HTML5
HTML5 is the most fundamental website-building tool and you can’t ignore it regardless of whatever kind of website you’re looking to create. Let’s check out more of its interactivity.
What is HTML5?
Did you know Steve Jobs didn’t allow Flash on iOS? He was confident that HTML would transform the web without requiring Flash. Eventually, he was correct. HTML5 came out as the winner for structuring and presenting the web content in the most amazing way. It’s the fifth and latest version of Hypertext Markup Language.
While HTML5 provides the core web structure, it needs two of its best friends to work with; Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) for taking care of presentations; and JavaScript for making or triggering things or events in a website.
Why HTML5 Is So Popular?
HTML5 is immensely popular and you’ll find half of the world’s top websites written in HTML5. The fact that it’s extremely friendly for search engines and can accommodate multimedia content contributes to its popularity.
It also adheres perfectly to W3C standards and is flexible for developers to build visually attractive and engaging websites. Unlike programming languages, HTML5 is just a markup language that’s intuitive and is the easiest one to learn. It comes with built-in features and has rich frameworks of CSS and JavaScript to support it.
How to Create an Interactive Website With It?
When we talk about creating an interactive website with HTML5, we mean making it more appealing to visitors by adding different interactive elements. Let’s learn how to do that.
- Use CSS Bootstrap Framework or Templates
HTML gives your website a structure but not styling. That’s why we have CSS as an integral part of HTML to design your pages. One of the key design factors for an interactive website is responsiveness.
The easiest way you can make a responsive webpage is by adding Bootstrap Framework to your site. It comes with predefined CSS classes, JavaScript plugins, and other prebuilt components. You can also choose from a wide collection of templates that use the latest frameworks of HTML5, CSS3, and Bootstrap.
- Add Attractive Buttons
You want to make your users do something to boost interactivity. In HTML5, one of the most interactive elements to add to your website is Button. You ask your users to press the button to open a menu or an internal page. It keeps them engaged and exploring your site. Make sure to style the buttons with CSS and make them look more attractive.
- Create Polls and Quizzes
HTML5 includes elements like a radio button and a checkbox. You can create polls and surveys using the radio buttons. This will boost user engagement. Elements like checkboxes or drop-downs will help you create quizzes and introduce a reward system for the winners. You can also receive ratings with these elements.
- Use Forms to Create User-Generated Content
You can use forms and text boxes in HTML5. These are called input elements that can help you create interactive user-generated content. Like you may be creating a textbox asking the user to leave comments or feedback. You can also ask for user registration and login by using HTML forms. This will help you generate members and subscribers for your website.
- Add HTML5 Animations with HTML Canvas Elements
You can also make the websites visually immersive using HTML5 Canvas Elements. It’ll allow you to create vibrant animations using a combination of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (JS). The canvas element works as a drawing board for images, audio, and video that requires JS and CSS elements to control animations and edit the multimedia elements.
- Embed Native HTML5 Audio and Video Elements
You no longer have to use Flash to play the audio and video content on your website. HTML5 supports native audio and video to be played to get users engaged in your website. The audio and video tags along with the ‘src’ attribute allow you to add media to your website. It also supports vector graphics and light games. So you can create a multimedia-rich website to provide a captivating user experience.
3 Highly Interactive Websites Using Html5
HTML5 is behind most websites in the world including the following:
- League of Legends (www.leagueoflegends.com/): It probably makes the most interactive website in the gaming category built with HTML5. The graphics, animations, and videos make a breath-taking experience for the visitors. Starting from membership to online activities, the site has almost everything needed for an interactive website.
- Disney Park (www.disneyparks.disney.go.com/): Having HTML5 at the core, Disney Park is the perfect example of an interactive website. While there’re other technologies used on the site, but you’ve to thank HTML5 for the way the contents are organized. The visitors feel like having a virtual tour around Disney Park and playing with its characters.
- The BookSeller (www.thebookseller.com/): Now moving from visually appealing websites to a content-based interactive website made with HTML. This website allows users to do a lot as they can explore the news, read blog posts, share opinions, and whatnot! It brings in a community and there’s every chance you’ll be hanging around there.
How to Create an Interactive Website Using Wix
While talking about website builders and platforms for interactive websites, Wix is one tool that you can’t ignore. Let’s find out why!
What is Wix?
Wix is the most popular cloud-based web-building platform. It’s an easy-to-use tool optimized with a drag-and-drop interface. It offers a pool of native and third-party applications to create a resounding online presence.
With Wix, you don’t need to know coding or other technical skills. Simply have an email address and start with Wix’s web hosting in minutes! It also has a massive template collection that’s optimized with all the sustainable features a website requires.
Why Is Wix So Popular?
Wix is one of the most popular website-building platforms. It’s a free tool unless you want to upgrade to premium packages. Wix offers a wide range of templates, massive built-in applications, and an intuitive drag-and-drop interface.
One can easily extend the site features with the Wix App Market and tons of its extra features. It has excellent site speed and provides solid customer support.
How to Create an Interactive Website With It?
Wix is a feature-rich website builder that can easily set you up for an interactive website. Check out how to go about that.
- Choose an Interactive and User-friendly Interface
Research shows that an interactive user experience depends on a website’s visual appeal, website speed, functionality, and web layout. You can get all these features in a wide range of Wix templates to create an interactive website. It also offers an excellent selection and customization of images alongside those beautiful templates.
- Add Interactive e-Commerce Apps
Wix provides a complete e-commerce solution with a wide range of trading-related apps. The apps like Etsy, Sellfy, and Ecwid make it easier for visitors to see through products and buy easily. You can also add apps for e-payment solution like InvoiceAsap that makes the payment mechanism much a breeze for the users.
- Integrate Social Media Plugins
Integrating social media options into your website will encourage visitors to share content and leave comments. You can integrate your Wix site with any social network and get your products and content promoted.
By doing so, you can build an interactive community across your social media pages. The integration process is intuitive and you could do this without any technical knowledge at all.
- Add Contact Forms
You can add contact forms to your website to build more interactivity. Wix allows you to apply different form templates to introduce event registration, appointment scheduling, making reservations, getting price quotes, and so on. You can also use the form to import and manage contacts, members, subscribers, etc.
- Include User-generated Content
Without including user-generated content, you can’t really create an interactive website. There’re some great third-party apps available in the Wix App Market that allow you to collect visitor feedback through polls, surveys, and forms. Survey & Poll by POWR is one such app that you could integrate into your Wix site.
- Make it Visually Immersive
You’ve to make a visually immersive website to attract your users. You can create stunning web pages by choosing and applying its wide range of scrolling effects, unique fonts, hover effects, and so on. You can add professional photos from Bigstock and customize the theme in Wix Editor for a vibrant and engaging outlook.
3 Highly Interactive Websites Using Wix
Some highly interactive and impressive website with Wix includes:
- French Knot Studios (www.frenchknotstudios.com): If an interactive website means a stunning image-driven site, this will make the perfect example of it. This is a boutique event planning site backed by Wix and we must say the theme and design exactly match its business concept. One will feel like booking their service online after getting to know them so beautifully.
- Xiao by Crustz (www.xiaobycrustz.com): This website is a perfect example of a purpose-built, interactive website. It belongs to a Malaysian boutique bakery that includes online shopping features. Besides its visually appealing images, you get interactive elements like FAQ, social sharing buttons, and interactive Google Maps.
- Sergio Aguero (www.sergioaguero.com): The website for Sergio Aguero is a classic example of a personal interactive site built with Wix. Whether you’re a Sergio fan or not, you must admire the outstanding design of his website. Besides some exotic images, you get to explore news and stats about him to stay engaged. You can have a chance to contact him and share the content.
How to Create an Interactive Website Using JavaScript
Interactivity in websites is synonymous with JavaScript. All the website-making platforms, in one way or the other, depend on JavaScript for interactivity. With a little help from HTML and CSS, you can create a highly engaging website with this language. How? Let’s find out.
What is JavaScript?
JavaScript is a text-based programming language that is used on both the server side and client side. It’s a part of the trio where the other two entities are HTML and CSS.
While HTML lays the structure and CSS provides the webpage styling, JS is used to add interactive elements to keep the users engaged. More than 97% of the world’s websites use JavaScript on the client side. It’s used to determine web page behavior by incorporating different third-party libraries.
Why Is JavaScript So Popular?
JavaScript is the most widely adopted language on the world wide web. It’s a standardized language that’s frequently updated. It works using Document Object Model (DOM) that responds to user interactions.
JS turns web browsers into applications and is used on both the front-end and back-end during web development. It offers a pool of interactive features like object movement, scrolls transitions, triggering events, and so on. JavaScript also comes with a wide range of libraries and frameworks that make it so popular.
How to Create Interactive Website With It?
You need to add the snippets or scripts of the JavaScript code into the header or body of your HTML document. Which ones? We’ll tell you here.
Create Alert and Confirmation Boxes
JavaScript includes popup boxes that you can use in your HTML site to display any notification or message to your visitor. The two most common popup boxes to interact with users include Confirm Box and Alert Box.
When these boxes are displayed, the users need to press ‘ok’ to proceed or ‘cancel’ to ignore. It could be a great way to get users moving to a different page or section.
Interact with Prompt
Prompt Box is the most interactive element of JavaScript that allows users to add a value to enter a page. You can use the prompt() method in your HTML site to display a dialog and an optional message as well. It returns a string or null based on the user input. With prompts, you can ask different questions to your users and get them answered.
Use JavaScript Forms
The form is the most efficient JavaScript element to capture user input and execute a script based on the ‘onsubmit’ event. You can create forms with text fields to take comments or feedback from users. When the user submits it, you can reflect a welcome message to provide them with an interactive experience.
Add Interactive Games
If you don’t want your users to get bored, add some JavaScript games to your website. You can get free code snippets of interactive games written in JavaScript. They can be easily embedded on HTML sites. Some of these games could be Racer, Tower builder, Tetris, Chess, Tic Tac Toe, etc.
Create a Visually Immersive Experience with JS Plugins
If you’re looking to add some awesome functionalities and visual effects to your website, JavaScript gets you covered with some of its excellent plugins.
To make the website interactive, it has to be visually stunning. Mojs is a JS library for motion graphics and animation that allows you to create icons, shapes, bursts, and many more.
Scroll animations and effects are something you want to create for your website. JS plugins like ScrollTrigger and Scroll Effects can create mesmerizing scroll animations and effects for your users with a few custom lines of CSS.
Date and time pickers can help your users create schedules or reservations. For that, you can use the powerful and lightweight Flatpickr plugin.
3 Highly Interactive Websites Using Javascript
You’d hardly find an interactive website without JavaScript. Some of the most impressive ones are:
- Visit Humboldt (www.visithumboldt.com): This website belongs to the tourist destination Humboldt County in California. The place offers endless activities for vacations and so does the website that makes users click and scroll with different JavaScript features.
- COBAYES (www.cobay.es): It’s an animal research website where JavaScript is at its best. The site offers a truly immersive and interactive experience that you can feel with every scroll and click of your mouse.
- Radio Garden (www.radio.garden): Websites that are made of interactive maps are probably the most fascinating to explore. Radio Garden is one such amazing website that allows you to zoom around the globe to tune into some live radio stations near you.
How to Create an Interactive Website with Drupal
The final website-building platform we’re going to talk about here is Drupal. It’s one of the top web content management systems used by millions of users. Here we’ll find out how to make an interactive website with Drupal.
What is Drupal?
Like WordPress, Drupal is a free, open-source web-building platform. You can also call it a web publishing tool that allows you to create and manage content on a website. Drupal isn’t merely a tool but it’s a tool builder for many customized web publishing tools. Drupal powers some of the top websites in the world ranging from corporate sites and personal blogs to government sites.
Why Drupal So Popular?
Drupal is behind some of the busiest websites in the world. Besides being free and open-source, it’s one of the easiest website builders to use. It doesn’t even require any technical skills to create any website. Drupal makes the best choice for a high-traffic website with complex and heavy content. It’s an extremely secure, functional, and flexible platform with tons of built-in features. Moreover, it’s supported by a strong and large community.
How to Create an Interactive Website With It?
Drupal allows you to create interactive websites with readily available modules and elements. Let’s take a look at some of these.
Choose an Interactive and Elegant Theme
While working with CMS, the first thing you need to do is choose an interactive and responsive theme. It should also be visually elegant and attractive. You should be choosing a theme that creates an immersive experience regardless of the device the visitors use.
Embed Video and Carousel
Drupal comes with a media module that will allow you to embed exciting videos on your page. It also allows you to add carousels or slideshows to your site. They provide a great way to grip users as users want to keep going for the next image. Using these elements. you can display the services, products, and logos in the most interactive manner.
Add Module for Comments and Feedback
As a site owner, you’ll want your users to comment and leave feedback on your content. With Drupal, you can easily do it with the Comment Module. It allows the users to leave their opinions about the content. The Comment Notification module will notify you about new comments.
Integrate Social Media Buttons
With interactive websites, you want your users to actively share your content. Drupal empowers content sharing with the integration of popular social sharing buttons. You can add share buttons for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Reddit easily with the AddToAny module.
Create Your Own Community
To increase user engagement, Drupal allows you to create your own community with the Open Social module. This is a Drupal distribution that looks to create space for sharing knowledge and communication. The members of the platform can tag members, organize and manage events, follow current trends in the community, and so on.
Live Chat
Integrating chat and messaging options gives a better chance to communicate with the users. You can use LiveChat, a messaging software that could be integrated into Drupal to provide customer service and increase online sales. This will allow you to stay connected with users in case they don’t find their queries unanswered in the existing information.
3 Highly Interactive Websites Using Drupal
Let’s take a look at some of the most immersive Drupal websites here:
- Tesla (www.tesla.com): Tesla is said to be one of the new big things the world is witnessing. This is a visually immersive website with highly engaging images. The visual effects hover effects, and graphical interface force users to take a better look at Tesla’s outstanding electric vehicles.
- NASA (www.nasa.gov): Drupal is the platform for NASA’s online portal. The website structure and design keep up with the illustrious reputation of NASA as a space-research organization. The readers find it engaging enough to go through the comprehensive news and knowledge.
- Oxford University (ox.ac.uk): Having Oxford University on the list, Drupal shows its strength as a website-building platform for top organizations. The tons of information is organized so well that you don’t get carried for a second. From academic information and events to news and blogs you can go through everything seamlessly.
Final Verdict
As we approach the end of the article, we expect you to know how to make an interactive website in the most effective way. If you’re good with programming and staff, you could go with solo website-building technologies like HTML5 and JavaScript to make interactive websites. But if you don’t want to focus on the technical parts and want an easy-to-use tool, we prefer going with complete website-building platforms like WordPress, Wix, and Drupal.
Wix stands out for us as the best overall website-building tool. It offers massive features and functionalities that can be easily used to create an interactive and captivating website of any genre. If you’re a writer or a blogger, Developing with WordPress will probably make the best choice for you. It allows you to integrate all the applications and plugins that you could ask for.