4 Interactive Website Design Tips Dental Sites Can Use

Creating an interactive website isn’t as simple as including elements that move. You don’t want to force visitors to click on hundreds of parts to reach the information they need.

Having a good user experience is vital to keeping visitors on your site. But that experience can definitely include interactive elements.

Female designer using laptop, sketching at blank notepad. Woman hand writing in notebook on wooden desk. — Female designer using laptop, sketching at blank notepad. Woman hand writing in notebook on wooden desk

So read on to discover 4 ways your dental office can benefit from interactive website design.

1) Find New Ways to Present Your Services

It’s easy to just display your services on a page. Perhaps you offer a range of products for your clients to buy in your dental office.

Instead of showing them in rows of static product shots, why not use a series of sliders? Or use animations to offer alternate views of the products when the user hovers the cursor over the images.

You can do the same with your services. Change the photos when a user rolls the mouse of the images. Or animate them if a user clicks on them.

2) Have ‘Distractions’ Available To Speed Up Your Site

Using interactive website design can involve animated sections of the site. Depending on the speed of your visitor’s connection, they can sometimes ‘slow down’ the experience of the site.

Give your visitors something to do, or to read, while they’re waiting for the next section to load. Funny quips for children or even dental facts for adults would be a good distraction.

Visitors will assume you’ve slipped the facts in there to educate them so they won’t notice the speed lag of the website.

Plan these ‘distractions’ while you design your sitemap.

3) Make the Results of Interaction Obvious

There’s nothing worse than clicking on an interactive website and not knowing if it did anything. While you don’t want to detract from the overall experience of using the site, you do want visitors to know their click did something.

Maybe it’s just changing the color of a button so they know they’ve clicked on it. Or maybe starts a video tour of your practice. Perhaps it lets them vote in a competition, causing a number clicker to increase.

Whatever it is, your visitors should know their click had an effect on your website.

4) Test Your Interactive Website Design Before It Goes Live

As a dentist in Highland Park, IL, you don’t need to focus on leading the visitor through your website as a journey. They only need to know what you do, where you are, and why they should trust you.

But you want to know that your sliding photo galleries, mouseover animations, or loading screens actually work before you put them online.

Test your prototype versions on different browsers and different devices. You might find that it works well on Google Chrome but it keeps crashing in Safari.

It’s best to find out these problems – and solve them – before it goes live.