As the field of website design has matured, there has been a trend towards more interactive websites. These are great for your visitors because it makes them feel more involved and it allows you to do more than you could with a static website. There are several technologies that you can use to add interactive elements to your website. The following are some of the most popular methods of creating an interactive website.
Flash
Adobe Flash has been a mainstay of interactive website design for several years. There has been a history of over using Flash in many cases with large animations taking a long time to download. There are still some websites that make this mistake, but most are now using Flash for what it was intended forcreating great interactive content. There arent many options that are better for doing those things that arent normally possible in standard HTML. But keep in mind that there are still some platforms that dont support Flash so there could be incompatibility problems. To make the most of Flash, it will normally require the expertise of a graphic design company, although if you want interactive graphical content you can use the same experts who create your interactive design to also create your graphics.
Java
The platform independent Java has also been around for a long time, and has also been overused in the past. Its now one of the most popular programming languages, so there are a large number of Java programmers producing programs that run on the platform. Java programs have the advantage of being able to run on most computer platforms and can run as fully fledged standalone applications. They dont necessarily have to be a part of a website, but they certainly can be very useful for adding functionality to your site.
JavaScript and jQuery
JavaScript is a common scripting language thats suitable for writing scripts that run in the clients browser, and jQuery is an extension library that allows JavaScript to query databases. Between them, these make up the interactive content for a large number of websites. Web content that uses JavaScript is usually fairly basic. Despite its name, JavaScript is not a cut down version of Java.
CSS Animation
Cascading Style Sheets, or CSS, are a way to describe the presentation of a web page. From its origin in 1996, CSS has now grown to be one of the most popular systems for web design. As it has evolved, it has become more fully-featured and one of the recent developments is CSS animation. A number of web developers have taken this animation and used it to make great interactive content for their websites.
A great graphic design company or website design professional can help you create an amazing interactive website. Flash has been the industry standard for a long time, but the other methods are increasing in popularity. As these technologies evolve then extra features will be added to all of them to keep up with the competition. This will only help to make it easier to make really great interactive websites.
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