Disclaimer: Any products/services mentioned or recommended below are suggestions based on our own experiences. We have no affiliation with any of the products or services mentioned and you should always thoroughly and independently research your options to decide what is best for you.
While the pandemic may finally be easing here in Australia (touch wood), and toilet paper is back in blissful abundance, many of us are still a few weeks or months away from the resumption of our usual routines. And thus, if you have a little extra time up your sleeve at the moment, we thought we’d put together a quick list of 3 interesting or unusual ways to spruce up your website!
Without further ado, check out our current 2020 favourites below:
Typeform
TypeForm is a really cool and simple way to make your website look ultra-modern and on the ball. Essentially, it turns the traditional contact form experience into an interactive conversation.
Rather than seeing all of the questions in a big, long list format, your user will be asked one question – usually starting with their name. TypeForm can then use the information it is receiving on the fly, for instance, by addressing the customer by their name in all subsequent questions. The experience feels snappy and modern and is much more interesting to participate in that filling in a standard contact form.
You can also choose a multitude of response options, such as giving your visitors multiple choice, or the ability to include attachments. This software can be adapted to a wide range of use cases, from recruitment to feedback collection, and of course, lead generation.
Hotjar
Ever struggled to decide what you should be saying on your website? Or perhaps, wondered whether people actually bother to read that carefully crafted introduction, or if they scroll straight on past your painstakingly produced introduction video?
Hotjar is as close to stalking as you can get without it getting… well, creepy. This software takes anonymous recordings of the actions that your visitor’s take on your website, such as where they move their mouse, when they scroll and what they hover or click on. It also creates heat maps, showing you the “hottest” areas of your website that people spend the most time interacting with. This can be a great way to work out what parts of your website actually matter to your visitors, and what kind of content they are truly interested in.
With this information on hand, you can streamline your content, remove anything that isn’t providing much use, and replace it with the content that truly captures your visitor’s attention. This can quickly give you a real edge in making sure you catch your visitor’s attention when they first land on your website.
Just be sure to only use Hotjar periodically while testing, as it can have an impact on your website’s speed and performance. When you’re no longer actively using it – simply remove the embedded code. You can always put it back later on anytime you want to start collecting data again.
VideoAsk (By Typeform)
We’ve arguably saved the best for last! VideoAsk (by the same developers that created Typeform) is a very new player in the field and offers an exceptionally interactive and interesting experience for your website’s visitors. The platform allows you to create an experience whereby your visitors are presented with a selection of questions that they can click on to “ask”. When they click on a question, they are shown a pre-recorded video of you, or someone representing your business, answering this question. Within that pre-recorded video, you may, in turn, ask the visitor a question of your own, to further determine their requirements and provide even more relevant and interesting information suited to their query. It’s an excellent way to encourage interaction with your website and increase the amount of time, and therefore the emotional rapport and investment, your visitor will establish with your business.
VideoAsk offers some impressive functionality, such as allowing visitors to respond to questions by recording their own video responses, providing images, or writing text. In any case, we found the technology to be addictive and entertaining, to say the least. Check out the example on VideoAsk’s home page to see it in action for yourself!
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