Nowadays, it is hard to find a successful company without a solid presence on the Internet. Having a strong presence is an absolute must, if you want to be able to stay afloat and to become profitable. Thus this means that you should exercise ingenuity on your websites and you should design them with flair and professionalism. Your websites must be interesting enough so that you are able to capture the attention of your visitors on the Internet; but it must also be functional enough, so that you are actually able to give something useful to your visitors.

This can be a very hard equation to balance and in some cases most websites go either one way or the other. However, there are certain elements of web design that you can incorporate in to your website and these elements will make it interesting and functional at the same time. These elements are interactive elements to make your website interactive and thus more useful to your visitors.

When it comes to how to make your website interactive; there are quite a lot of ways to accomplish this. Even before the advent of Web 2.0 elements, you were able to put a guestbook even a decade ago, so that your visitors could leave you a feedback to help you steer your web development. However, now with the presence of the Web 2.0 tools; you have quite a powerful arsenal at your disposal.

Now, with the Web 2.0 tools you can make your website interactive by installing blogs, discussion forums, online chatting, and topic polls along with opt in boxes which have interactive auto reply techniques. Using these tools and techniques, you can actually make your website come alive and you can make it functional and responsive 24 hours a day and 365 days a year.

Your visitors can easily share their opinions about your website, your company and your products through its blogs and discussion forums or they can even chat online using these tools. You can put polls to measure the popularity as well as the cons of your products or you can enroll people to your newsletters with various opt in boxes. You can create feedback posts and special forms for two way communication with your website.

Using these will allow your website to become interactive and thus your visitors can feel included in the process. Thus your users will feel more at ease with your website and with your products and thus this will earn you more exposure and sympathy on the Internet which you can then translate into profits.

Furthermore, having interactive components can help you to steer your web development to accommodate the needs of your potential customers in a better way. So, as you can see, having an interactive website works both ways and thus both you and your visitors can get positive feedback from using these features.

However, you shouldn’t over do it and you should use a professional to help you develop these features for best results.

Peter Brittain
Perth Digital Agency