Interactivity and your Website
Depending on the size, scope and nature of your planned website there may be the need for interactive features in addition to the 'flat' or static content pages.
These can range from the very familiar through to very bespoke and relatively complex web applications that are built just for your site.
Common examples of interactive features would be for instance a forum or message board where you can create a community for your website visitors and hopefully encourage both dialogue and return visits from those who come across your site.
The word 'interactive' is used rather loosely online; in the most common sense it simply refers to anything on the website that is capable of responding to user input - which is what distinguishes it from ordinary HTML pages which are incapable of processing user input.
Therefore the feedback or contact form is one of the simplest interactive features there are, but is nevertheless very important. Never display an email address on your website for feedback but always use a contact form - this is because there are robots that scan the web for email addresses to add to spam lists, so if you leave an email address on a website it may not remain usable for long.
Of course, many interactive features are fairly bespoke to a website. For instance, if you are a company that specialises in helping people get better, higher paid jobs, then you might like to add an interactive calculator where people enter their salary and you tell them how much more they would earn over 25 years if they got a 10% pay raise (which you could help them do).
Other common interactive features could be a survey to find out more about your customers. If you are selling products then there are a whole host of ways you might want to use interactive features to help illustrate your products. For instance if you sell T-shirts with personalised text on them you could have an application whereby the user enters their text, font and colour and the interactive application mocks up what the T-shirt would look like.
Be sure to think about if your site needs interactive content and to what extent at some stage in the planning and content writing stages... it might seem obvious and all part and parcel of the discussions you have with your web designer up front. However it is surprisingly common that these considerations and ideas only crop up during the build process or even afterwards, and interactive features can be the most time consuming and difficult (equals costly) to build, depending how bespoke they are.
Therefore be sure to think about any interactive requirements on your website before you get the quote from your web designer for build. If your website requires ecommerce capabilities then a range of interactive features will be required. Read more about ecommerce.
If your website has no ecommerce requirements, move to Future proofing and updating your website.
This guide to building a business ecommerce site is by Clarity Media Ltd
Quick Links
Researching the opportunity... Site strategy... Site structure... Interactivity... Ecommerce... Future proofing and updating... Creating content... Choosing images... Site build... Launch... Measuring success... Building traffic: free methods... Building traffic: paid methods... Onwards and upwards
Home page: building a business website guide
Quick Links
Researching the opportunity... Site strategy... Site structure... Interactivity... Ecommerce... Future proofing and updating... Creating content... Choosing images... Site build... Launch... Measuring success... Building traffic: free methods... Building traffic: paid methods... Onwards and upwards
Home page: building a business website guide
