Feel like your website is starting to look a little bland? Want to make it a little more interactive? Well one option is of course to redesign it … but unless your website is really old, it may not be in your budget to redesign it. Or maybe it's a new website and you like it but you are just looking for that "Wow" factor … well here are some easy tips to either implement yourself or ask your web developer to do for you:
1. Add a countdown feature
What am I counting down to exactly? Well the answer is anything you want! Announce that you're having a massive sale, and put a countdown calendar on your home page counting down the hours, minutes and seconds remaining until the spending frenzy begins! Or if you have a major event coming up, or a new product … really anything of interest.
2. Add Facebook and Twitter
Social media is all the rage right now … it's almost an expectation of any legitimate business to be on Facebook and Twitter. Give your users a little link on your website so they can follow you and become fans. Another good idea is to add a Facebook Badge.
3. Insert a photo gallery.
There are a lot of really nice looking photo galleries available for free. And you do not have to have a wizard at HTML either, just use the code already provided.
If you're looking for one that is a popup, check out Lightbox ( http://leandrovieira.com/projects/jquery/lightbox/ ). It's really easy to implement with any web design already in place. If you want something a little more fancy check out this one ( http://fullfiguredcreations.com/news/ ) – it's a little more difficult to implement but is really nice.
4. Add a survey
Everyone loves to have their voice heard – let them express themselves on your website by voting! Of course it totally depends on your product / service but this is especially easy to do if you use a CMS like Joomla or WordPress which both have survey plugins. But if not you can either have your developer set one up for you – or worse case scenario use SurveyMonkey.
5. Add a video
This is really easy to put on your website, the hard part may be figuring out what to make a video of. YouTube and Vimeo both let you embed your videos on your website and I would recommend using one of them. Make your video fairly short, and focus on making it either fun or informative … and ideally both!
Good luck!