10 Interactive Website Platforms

for 6 Business Scenarios

Contrary to what you might expect, I am not going to suggest platforms based on exhaustive feature comparisons. Instead, I will use some scenarios that I often encounter, which are based on your overall business situation and, as such, better as a guideline than a specific feature. Of course, it can always be that one of the platforms offers a specific feature that you simply must have. Here is the bad news though: it is likely that you will have to go through several platforms as your business grows over the years. So at some point, you will be looking at migration projects. This may sound more scary than it actually is, because at some point in the life of your business you are bound to want to redesign your site, and that is a migration anyway. Here are different scenarios you can choose from. Feel free to click through to the section that interests you most:

If you are running your own business or just starting up and you are looking to create a great interactive website, it is time to roll up your sleeves. Unless, of course, you can already afford to outsource the whole website project to an external designer or agency. But most solopreneurs and small businesses (writers, restaurants, wedding planners, photographers, artists) that I talk with seem to be more inclined to try to save some money and go for a DIY approach. Luckily, since a couple of years, there are great platforms on the market that allow you to do just that! Most of these platforms offer a visual, non-coding interface and allow you to get started without going through an in-depth study of HTML and CSS. The biggest caveat is that all these platforms are based on themes, which allows you to get a quick and easy start, but which also imposes a lot of restrictions on you. In terms of design, and often even functionality, you will have to live within the boundaries of the template. Nevertheless, this is a good place to start, especially if you are not generating revenue or have funding.

You can start with platforms that are as low as around $10 USD monthly. If you don’t count your hours (but you should) and you write your own copy and find free images that could be your only cost. At parties, people will always boast that they used tool X or Y and built a website in an hour. If you know exactly what you will write, which images you will choose and what your layouts and color schemes will be, that might be feasible. Might. Realistically though, you should count 2-10 days or more to complete your website. The end result will depend on how much time you will spend on building the website, and how close you stay to the template. In any case, you should have a nice-looking website which can serve as your 'business card' online.

• Low cost
  
• Fast start

• Likely less performant (speed & distribution)
  
• Best to stick to selected templates
  
• You are likely to outgrow these platforms as your business grows
  
  

Squarespace is sort of the stylish version of Wix. The Squarespace templates look extremely crisp, and if you select one of their templates, you should get a good-looking end result as well. The customization of the templates is somewhat more limited than Wix, so be careful in the selection of your template. The editor does offer somewhat of a learning curve (although it has improved a lot since the first time I tried it 4 years ago), and selected fonts and images are a big part of what makes the templates look good – you will want to spend some time looking for great images.

At $18 USD monthly, Squarespace is on the higher end in this category, but good design has no price, right?

If you want more freedom—or a customized look—and you have some design skills or a small budget to spend on design:

Muse is Adobe’s freeform tool for web development. It allows designers to create responsive sites in a visual interface without coding. Muse is oriented towards designers, it offers no fully developed themes, only ready-made widgets, which speed up creation of your website. The intended audience is still very small companies - as exemplified in their cool “designer matchup,” where designers are competing to create a food truck’s best website.

Webflow is a visually oriented design tool that allows you to build responsive websites without coding. It is oriented towards designers, and the user interface is to be on the complex side for people new to design. For experienced designers, the interface should not present too much of a challenge. Webflow does offer you the option to have your site hosted as well in case you would not want more than CSS/HTML as output.

Webflow offers you a myriad of options, but if you are unfamiliar with how HTML and CSS work, then this is not the platform for you. At any rate, prepare for a serious learning curve. Pricing for Webflow is slightly confusing, but you should be able to create and host a single site starting at $32 USD monthly. Somewhat recommended:

You have a running business and you are also in a better place to decide what marketing tactics are working for you. Likely, you have a good budget to hire an external agency or designer and/or you have a designer in your marketing team (however small that ‘team’ may still be). So, it is time to take control over the marketing and content-design aspect of your site and to tune your site to those specific tactics rather than sticking with general templates that look great but are not tailored to your business. “Why?” You might ask. “The template-driven website has worked well for me so far.” Here is why I want you to kiss those templates goodbye and switch to a 'continuous-improvement' model: By now, you will have been getting business through your website, in the form of leads and/or direct sales.

To achieve this, you can just go ahead and try to increase the amount of traffic or visits to your site by buying ads or banners. That might work, but likely you have already been doing that to get to this point with your business. The time is here to do more, but especially to do it better. Two tactics you absolutely need to get (more) into at this stage are conversion optimization and search engine optimization.

Conversion optimization, or conversion rate optimization (CRO), is increasing the percentage of visitors to your site that convert into customers. Or, more general, any type of desired action, such as subscribing to a newsletter, request a demo, etc.

In other words: get more business out of your website even if everything else (advertising, traffic, visits, etc) stays the same. In the discipline of CRO (conversion-rate-optimization), you will be changing some parts of your communication and marketing on your website. That might be changing some wordings, changing colors, changing images, or even changing the actual marketing call-to-action. People engaged in this can see increases in conversions (or in plain words, leads and sales) of double digits by changing subtle wordings and colors. Now imagine if you can change more than just a color. Imagine that the whole page, the whole experience will be tailored and optimized. You are then talking about some serious results. Here are some of the results people are seeing from website optimization (and that does mean a custom-website experience):

You have hundreds, or maybe even thousands of webpages, and these are likely managed by IT through a content management system (CMS). I assume that you are looking for a smaller, nimble solution to complement your existing CMS, and with the additional benefit of not having to rely on IT for every small change so you can reduce the workload you are giving to IT.

The goal is to allow you to nimbly add and create interactive websites for specific purposes or marketing campaigns. Also, you want to make sure that you are selecting a platform which offers more than DIY-support. You have a full-time job, you will not have the time to go through a long learning period of self-study and experimentation.

Ion Interactive is a great solution for (larger) companies looking to add quizzes, interactive infographics, assessments or ratings onto their content. Ion offers ‘quick starts,’ which allow you to develop these types of content reasonably quickly and get them ready for publishing. Ion’s users do report that there is a solid learning curve and some complexity (even coding sometimes).

At the medium- to higher-end of the price range, Ion is a solution mostly used by larger enterprises.

You are doing eCommerce, and you will already have an eCommerce platform in place and you are using it to promote and sell your products.

Fact is though, your eCommerce platform is built to be an (advanced) listing of product and category pages that can be added to an online shopping cart, and then processed through payment and shipping channels. If you are looking to increase your customer experience by adding interactive websites to the mix, that is honestly an excellent idea. You can read more of why content will add more sales in this article . With regards to the platform to build that interactive website, likely you are in a growth or enterprise-like scenario. But a vital requirement, no matter what content or site you create, is that an integration has to exist with your eCommerce platform like Magento or Shopify.

Zmags has concentrated its efforts completely on the retail sector. Like Readz, they offer integrations with eCommerce platforms that allow brands to create shoppable content. If you are not a retail customer, you will not fall in Zmags’ ideal customer profile.

If you are in retail though, then Zmags can offer you embeddable, responsive (mobile & desktop) shoppable content, allowing you to get sales directly from your content. On the min side, speedtests reveal that Zmags’ content is rather slow (even when surfing the Zmags website, a spinner regularly pops up) and the quality of the technical SEO is doubtful.

Zmags pricing model places them in the mid to high range.

You are running an agency or working at one and your business is selling the creation of interactive website projects for other businesses. Some of the challenges you are facing is the growing price pressure on web development and the difficulty in getting clients to commit to a recurring (retainer) business model. You might have in-house designers, even developers, and maybe your team has strong expertise in hand-coding or development on a platform like Wordpress. If you have a team with a strong expertise in an existing platform, there will be a natural resistance from the team to adopt new technologies. I often see the case where the CEO asks his team to 'test' a new platform, and the team replies with a load of specific scenarios where the new technology would not work, rather than investigating a general-use case, which often would highlight the possibility of saving considerable resources (and increasing the bottom line) for 80% of the mainstream projects. If on the other hand, you are focusing in-house on content creation and/or design, and you have no desire to build out a coding team, then I strongly recommend that you investigate these platforms. Some of them even offer limited services, which you could use as a sub-contractor.

My recommendation here is straightforward and likely makes sense to you. Ask yourself what type of customers you serve. The tools that I recommend for that group (solopreneur, growth, enterprise, eCommerce) should be the tools you adopt.

Readz helps marketers and media companies create an interactive website with an easy-to-use drag-and-drop platform and integrated marketing stack — no coding or templates necessary. Readz offers a drag-and-drop visual editor, with pre-made modules and a wide variety of animations. Design-wise, you get a lot of freedom on Readz. It is hard to find the boundaries of what the system will offer. For brands, they offer a powerful marketing stack so marketers and advertisers can drive their content goals: forms, CTAs, a strong focus on technical SEO and SEO rankings, as well as integrated analytics about actual conversions on your content. Starting at $125 USD monthly for unlimited publications, Readz is an obvious choice for companies looking for a solid ROI.