It’s no secret that interactive web design has a lot of benefits. From providing opportunities for creativity to increasing customer engagement, it can help you make your website more engaging and immersive.
But how do you actually get started? Interactive design isn’t exactly rocket science, but there is a learning curve. That’s why we’ve put together this list of the best interactive design software on the market.
By the time you’re done reading this list, you’ll know which software can help you create the interactive web experience of your dreams.
Interactive Web Design Software
Best website builders
1. WordPress
Source: WordPress
WordPress powers 40% of websites around the world, and no wonder. This web builder offers thousands of pre-made themes and a high level of customization (thanks to its functionality and 50,000+ plugins), making it a perfect choice when building a website to fit your brand. WordPress also has an excellent content management system (CMS). It’s easy and straightforward to publish content in the blink of an eye. And word has it that it’s the best CMS for SEO.
WordPress offers a free plan. Paid plans start at $4/month.
2. Webflow
Source: Webflow
Webflow is an all-in-one responsive web design tool that folds a CMS, managed web hosting, and free SSL certificate all in one no-code platform. Build interactions and animations into your website, drag-and-drop unstyled HTML elements. Or make use of pre-built elements like sliders, tabs, and background videos. The tool features a master component library of core layouts, components, and patterns. Plus, Webflow gives you the ability to prototype and export code to hand off to developers if you don’t want to launch a site on its native subdomain.
Webflow starts free, with plans going up from $12/month on an annual basis.
3. Wix
Source: Wix
Wix is a user-friendly web design software for complete beginners. Don’t know where to start? Choose from over 800 templates or answer a few questions from Wix Artificial Design Intelligence (ADI). ADI will automatically build a website based on your responses. To customize it, drag and drop elements on the screen and edit as you see fit.
Wix offers a free plan. Paid plans start at $4.50/month.
Additional options of a drag-and-drop website builder include Boxmode and Webwave.
4. Statamic
Say hello to Statamic, the CMS of the future. Built by developers for developers, this laravel-based and open-sourced CMS handles everything without any plugins. And by everything, we mean everything. Custom fields, navigation builder, search, you name it. Compared to other CMS, it’s easy to customize Statamic from the frontend. Its flat-file mode reduces complexity and makes maintenance a piece of cake. This is one cool web builder.
It’s free to use Statamic. Paid plans start at $259/site with an additional $59 for updates (free for the first year).
5. Ghost
Source: Ali Abdaal
Ghost is a simple professional publishing platform. In addition to the blogging tool’s standard features, Ghost also offers built-in memberships and email newsletters. Other great features include the minimalistic and powerful editor, site speed, and user-friendly and lightweight CMS. If you want to set up a membership website with zero hassle, look no further!
Ghost offers a 14-day free trial, with plans going up from $29/month when billed annually.
Best web editors
6. Adobe Dreamweaver
Dreamweaver is a simplified coding engine allowing a real-time preview of your content as you made edits to the code. Start your next responsive website project from a template or build from scratch. With Git support and code hints, you can custom-build all kinds of HTML assets like emails, eCommerce sites, portfolios, blogs, and more.
Start with a 30-day free trial. Plans start at $20.99/month or $52.99/month for the entire Adobe Creative Cloud when billed annually. (Prices vary for students, teachers, and businesses.)
7. RapidWeaver
RapidWeaver is a native web design software exclusively on and for Mac. Choose from 50 built-in or over 100 community-built themes, and instantly see how your designs will look on various Apple devices. The software integrates with Unsplash and has a big focus on giving you SEO-friendly code.
RapidWeaver has a free trial. Download it for $84.99.
8. openElement
openElement is a free WYSIWYG web editor with a whole host of editing features that support many different page elements such as text, images, tables, lines. Some web elements are even drag-and-drop. Users praise it for being lightweight and SEO-friendly.
openElement is free.
9. Atom
Atom is an open-source hackable desktop code editor from GitHub. Use this tool to access thousands of open source packages, explore text editor themes built by the Atom community, and work in CSS, HTML, and JavaScript. You can also run Teletype for Atom to share workspaces for synchronous code editing.
Atom is free.
10. CoffeeCup HTML Editor
CoffeeCup HTML Editor was built for WYSIWYG precision and excellence. Work from scratch in HTML, CSS, and PHP, or choose from an existing theme. Use the “Open from Web” option to take any website as a starting point for your new design. With a components library, code validation tool, and live preview, you’ll have your next web design up and running quickly.
Try CoffeeCup for free or buy it for $29.
11. Sublime Text
Sublime Text is a cross-platform source code editor compatible with Mac, Windows, and Linux.. It supports many programming and markup languages natively.
You can download and try Sublime Text out for free. The personal license costs a one-off purchase of $80. And the business license starts from $65 per year for up to 10 seats and get cheaper as you get more seats.
. . .
To save your time, we create a cheat sheet with all the tools and resources mentioned in this post. Download it to browse everything at a glance and pick what you need quickly.
WEB DESIGN TOOLS CHEAT SHEET
Best web design software for ecommerce
12. Squarespace
Source: SquareSpace
Squarespace is a feature-packed website builder with 100+ flexible designer website templates. It offers customer account functionality for online stores as well as inventory management, discount codes, and abandoned card recovery. This site builder is gorgeous, so if you’re looking for flawless layouts and bleeding-edge artistic vibes, Squarespace may be the right ecommerce site option for you.
Squarespace starts with a 14-day free trial and moves up from $12/month yearly from there.
13. Shopify
Source: Shopify
Shopify is quickly becoming the go-to digital storefront platform. Every Shopify store comes with an SSL certificate, and you can buy domain names directly from them. The team is continually revising the shopping cart experience. That way, they can help reduce cart abandonment and give store owners and drop shippers the flexibility they need to dynamically determine shipping rates, taxes, and more. Shopify also has a suite of marketing tools and mature third-party integration ecosystem to help you sell more.
After a free 14-day trial, Shopify starts at $29/month. There’s also Shopify Lite for $9 per month for pre-existing websites.
14. BigCommerce Essentials
BigCommerce is an enterprise ecommerce solution. For smaller businesses, there’s BigCommerce Essentials, which offers responsive designs, no-code editor, advanced product search, and CRO tools – including an abandoned cart saver feature. Plus, choose from a vast variety of payment gateways.
BigCommerce Essentials starts with a 15-day free trial and goes up from $29.95/month.
15. Weebly
With over 40M sites, Weebly is Square’s powerful drag-and-drop website builder that’s doubled down on eCommerce features in recent years. Choose from template designs and get all the brand assets you need to launch your site quickly. Weebly also has abandoned cart and welcome email features, dynamic shipping pricing, and inventory tracking. It’s a website builder at heart, so you’ll have access to more themes and a lot of easy, user-friendly design functionality for putting your site together as you want it.
Weebly starts free and moves up from $5/month annually.
16. WooCommerce
WooCommerce is an open-source ecommerce platform by Automattic, making it a great choice if your website is on WordPress. Select a theme in the marketplace and customize it to fit your brand. Add products, customize your tax system, and automatically generate an invoice. This plugin can do everything an ecommerce store needs. Its intuitive interface allows you to set up a store in minutes with no coding required!
WooCommerce is a free plugin. Pay 2.9% and $0.30 for each transaction made with U.S.-issued credit or debit cards. Non-US cards cost an additional 1% fee.
Best web design software for interface and prototyping
17. EpicPxls
EpicPxls gives you a quick mockup superpower with easy, downloadable premium design assets. Choose from a well-curated selection of beautiful UI kits and website design templates in various common file formats. You can also download from a library of fonts, graphics, and icons. Preview zip files and make sure your design is in the right format. After you download the zip, create your customized site or app.
EpicPxls starts free. Paid plans start at $22/month for 20 downloads. Grab the $39 EpicPxls lifetime deal, available for a limited time in the AppSumo store.
18. Picter
Source: Picter
Picter is a feedback tool that speeds up your review process. Organize your content assets and create sub-folders to streamline your workflow. Comment on images or videos frame-by-frame and assign an edit request to a teammate. Once done, share the link with your client. No login is required from your client! Enough said, Picter’s in a class of its own.
Picter offers a seven-day free trial. Paid plans start at $12/member per month. Grab the Picter lifetime deal on AppSumo today for $49.
19. Startup 4 by Designmodo
Startup 4 is a free drag-and-drop bootstrap theme builder. With its customizable blocks, you can easily create websites fast, even if you have zero programming skills. Select a style and drag it to the canvas to customize it. Pick your favorite font from Google Fonts (it’s integrated with the editor), then export it in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to launch it.
It’s free to use Startup 4. Paid plans start at $21/month when billed annually.
20. Adobe XD
Adobe XD is the standard in UX/UI design that allows collaborative design and prototyping of intuitive web pages, apps, and much more — including voice interfaces! Add animations, build design systems, and build responsive web designs with content-aware layouts, responsive resize, and set reusable states for various components.
Adobe has a free starter plan. Pricing starts at $9.99/user per month or $52.99/month for the entire Adobe Creative Cloud when billed annually. (Prices vary for students, teachers, and businesses.)
interactive website ideas
In order to learn how to tell a good interactive website experience from a bad one, we’re going to take our lessons from the pros. Here, we’ve compiled 6 useful tips for interactive web design by rounding up some of our favorite examples and discussing what makes them work.
1. Take advantage of loading screen time
—
Loading can be one of the biggest obstacles to the web browsing experience. A business can put so much money and effort into building an outstanding, beautiful website, but if it takes more than two seconds to load, research has shown that the visitor becomes exponentially more likely to leave before seeing any of it. It’s fair to assume that users experience loading as a negative experience.
By lautzip
By Unlockit
But loading screens can also be an opportunity. If you have the user’s attention, why not make the most of it? These moments provide an unexpected and, therefore, extra special opportunity to impress users through animations. They’re a novelty chance to show off brand personality and engage and excite users. Often, these animations actually give the user a sense of progress with a loading bar (or something similar) to demonstrate how much time remains before the user accesses the next page.
Ideally, these loading screens offer users something to do, such as a game to play while they wait, which creates a fun, interactive experience.
The point is that loading doesn’t necessarily mean a negative experience for the user. They don’t even have to only be quick and painless—sometimes, they’re the most exciting part of a website.
Video Player00:0000:08
By Halal Lab via DribbbleVideo Player
Interactive loading animation by Aaron Iker via Dribbble
2. Organize information through animated scrolling
—
Scrolling is one of the simplest and most intuitive interactions that a user can make. But just because the user might not think about scrolling, doesn’t mean the web designer shouldn’t be! There are plenty of ways that designers have capitalized on scrolling animations to give the user a sense of dynamic movement throughout a website. Let’s go over some common ones.
Scroll-triggered animation
A popular technique has been to trigger specific animations to activate as the user scrolls through the website. It’s pretty magical in bringing visuals to life and it creates the illusion that the page the user is accessing is actually being built up, in real time, in response to their interaction.
Parallax scrolling (aka asymmetrical scrolling)
A similar technique that has been gaining traction is parallax scrolling. This type of movement involves say two objects on a screen moving at two different speeds, as the user scrolls down the page. The result is a simulation of 3D depth of movement, as foreground objects usually move faster than background objects.Video Player
By tubik via Dribbble
Video Player00:0000:09
By Yatish via DribbbleVideo Player
By Armand Chakhalyan via Dribbble
Scrolling page transitions
And finally, designers can use full page transitions, in which the traditional smooth scroll is replaced with either a jump to the next screen or a wholesale page change. This can create a dramatic effect, introducing not only new page elements but sometimes an entirely different color scheme, making the website feel brand new with every scroll.
Overall, these scrolling animations give users important feedback on their interaction—letting them know that they’ve just entered a new section of the website and should expect a change in the type of information being delivered. In short, they provide clear hierarchy and organization in an impressive, interactive package.
3. Breakup vertical movement with sliders and carousels
—
Carousels are so-called because they condense website content into rotating sections that the user can cycle through, much like the turnstile motion of a real-life carnival counterpart.
They are becoming more common on websites due to the increasing popularity of swiping interactions in mobile apps. Because they are essentially a form of horizontal scrolling, they provide the user a much needed break from the endless monotony of vertical scrolling.Video Player00:0000:14
By Glenn Catteeuw via Dribbble
But this is not the only reason why you might want to break up vertical movement. As we mentioned earlier, users tend to associate downward scrolling with progressing to a new part of the website. Carousels and sliders, on the other hand, allow web designers to incorporate more context to each section, since the user isn’t technically leaving them.
This means rather than cluttering the page with all the necessary information at once, carousels collapse site elements into more bitesize segments, allowing the user to cycle through them bit by bit.Video Player00:0000:13
By Giulio Cuscito via DribbbleVideo Player
By Synchronized via DribbbleVideo Player
By eleken via Dribbble
This works best when the content is similar in format, so group together either product images, profiles or customer testimonials etc. They’re also useful for showcasing variations, such as products that come in different colors. In terms of animating these carousels, styles range from straightforward left-to-right transitions, to card shuffling, to a rotating wheel animation that’s reminiscent of retro viewmaster slides.
4. Blow up the navigation menu
—
Like swiping, hamburger menus are another common trend of mobile/app design 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 displayed 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.Video Player00:0000:10
By Francesco Zagami via DribbbleVideo Player
By green chameleon via DribbbleVideo Player
By green chameleon via Dribbble
Since users are now choosing to pull up the menu, many designers are answering that call with navigation that takes over the entire screen. This allows for big typography, descriptive images and snazzy hover animations.
Going big with menu interaction makes sense: navigation is all about control. The user is effectively steering the ship and emphasizing the menu helps the user visualize the weight of their power over the page. All in all, menu designs are staying hidden until needed, at which point they become larger than life. If you ask me, it’s a nice change from the grey top-of-the-screen, nested lists of yore.
5. Replace forms with user questionnaires
—
One of the most onerous parts of interacting with a website is entering information. Users are generally wary of giving out their information on a website. The best way to mitigate this is by making the process less like filling out a form at the doctor’s office and more like a get-to-know-you question-and-answer session.
Video Player00:0000:10
By Merixstudio via DribbbleVideo Player
By Saga Design Team via Dribbble
To this end, many websites are transforming the onboarding process into interactive questionnaires, where questions are phrased in clear and personable ways, using multiple choice answers where appropriate to lessen the interactive burden on the user. Posing these questions one at a time keeps the user from feeling overwhelmed and more like they are participating in a back and forth conversation.Video Player00:0000:12
By Florian Pollet via Dribbble
In fact, a prime example of this technique in action has come from tax services like some tax preparation companies who break down tax forms into simple, easy-to-understand questions. This is especially helpful for services that have multiple potential products to sell to a site visitor and need to help narrow down their choices by understanding their needs, tastes, budget, and more.
6. Don’t neglect micro-interactions
—
Video Play
By Fireart Studio via Dribbble
When it comes to animation in interactive web design, the small movements are what really 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 to themselves can be distracting to the user, overshadowing whatever feedback they were meant to impart in order to show off the animator’s skill. This is where micro-interactions come in.Video Player00:0000:03
By Kashish Mehta via Dribbble
Video Player00:0000:08
By Aaron Iker via Dribbble
Micro-interactions are a broad category that describe all of the little ways that a user might interact with a page. Some examples of micro-interactions include hovering over something, closing out of a window, pulling to refresh, and clicking icons such as star ratings, bookmarks, notification bells or add to cart.
In terms of animating micro-interactions, some popular styles include turning a button green, transforming an icon into a checkmark, or an outgoing circle that accompanies a click like an adorable, baby shockwave. The goal is to let the user know that they’ve made a successful change to the page and the design of micro-interactions should be simple and satisfying to this end.
Conclusion
Let us know your thoughts in the comment section below.
Check out other publications to gain access to more digital resources if you are just starting out with Flux Resource.
Also contact us today to optimize your business(s)/Brand(s) for Search Engines