1. Mini-sites of delight

Humor can take many forms, and a website that provokes a laugh is always fun to build. Why not have some fun with your build?

In the early days of Pixar, the studio began giving animators time to make a short film alongside every feature film they produced. These shorts were a creative free-for-all, a time for animators to be looser and more playful without the pressure involved in their feature films. They also ended up generating a lot of new techniques that pushed the field of animation forward. Web developers are discovering they can do the same with websites.

‍2. Web-based scavenger hunts

Websites’ structures actually lend themselves to puzzles and scavenger hunts incredibly well. You can daisy-chain pages and password-protect certain parts, making visitors provide answers or find clues to unlock the next page in the series.

There are all sorts of creative ways to conceal and reveal prompts, clues, and answers. This is a case where you can use your web design prowess to create a puzzle that enthralls. 

Some ideas for clues:

• Provide a word based on a riddle or clue

• Find a word hidden in your main site or the scavenger hunt site

• Find a hidden clickable element on the page

• Draw a shape

• Decode a cipher

Just remember to give your audience some sort of hints or workarounds if you really want everyone to be able to make it to the end. A scavenger hunt can be used to reveal a product launch, release a new video, or give the viewer a hidden piece of information.

‍3. App-like experiences

Jeremy Beyt, co-founder of ThreeSixtyEight, strongly believes these sorts of smaller, experience-focused sites are the future of web design. He explains: “A front-end-driven web experience that’s really overblown from a design standpoint is a whole new way of using the web that hasn’t existed before; it's an app-like experience. That, to me, is the opportunity right now.” The world has gotten used to apps, where interaction, animation, and dynamic experiences are the norm. The logical next step is bringing that energy to websites and creating more unique experiences there.

Some imagine we’re headed back to times where sites were self-contained, esoteric, and curious. But new tools for site building, such as no-code, make dynamic, interaction-focused designs significantly easier to build. ThreeSixtyEight even added a full interaction-design-focused step to its development process.