Ten steps to a cooler website

As hard as it is to believe, dinosaurs, aliens and lasers aren't always appropriate on websites. So when these sure-fire instillers of coolness are taken out of the equation, what can we fall back on?

In no particular order, what follows is a short list of things I feel, if properly executed, can give sites an edge in the coolness stakes.

1. Video

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. If that picture is updating itself 24 times a second, and is saying words as well, there is a tremendous amount of information it can convey.

2. Games

Natural proponents of the "woosh" factor, games are cool. Again it ultimately comes down to execution, but games are more often that not worth the investment they require.

3. Drag and drop

It's not always appropriate, but allowing users to build queries or complete forms can greatly improve ease of use and enhance the user experience while still eliciting the "hey, that's cool" response.

4. Motion graphics

Wait, isn't that just video? No - rather than filmed / edited material, here we are talking about computer animation to give a bit of life to the page. A huge amount of complexity isn't always required, sometimes it's the simple things that aren't noticed at first that impress. Then again, something of great intricacy will produce the "wow" the first time...

5. 3d

Almost by definition, 3d is cool. Displaying products? It will allow the user to explore the item with unparalleled freedom. I have also seen some particularly cool proof of concepts for 3d user interfaces.

6. Interactive applications

Quite broad sounding, fun little applets can be cool, and quite viral in their own right. I have lost count of the number of people who have their own Simpsons avatar, for example.

7. Customisable layout

Allowing the user to configure your site to suit their own needs and preferences is very Web 2.0. As much as buzzwords like "web 2.0" are en vogue at the moment, this is still a cool feature which isn't used as often as it could or should.

8. Customisable sharable content

Allowing the user to personalise something and then share it with others can be natty feature which drives traffic and gets others interested. An example of this I have just been pointed to is http://www.potatoparade.co.uk/

9. Responsiveness

If you are suffering a slow connection, the graphics heavy site you are perusing can take ages to render every time you update a page or submit a form. Some well placed asynchronous AJAX goodness can alleviate this and give some cool results.

10. Design

It can have the best features, the most wooshy noises and still suffer in terms of coolness if the appearance isn't up to scratch.


There you have it - probably not comprehensive, but I only had 10 spaces so I had to drop gems like a friends’ suggestion of ice cubes in the server. Nonetheless, this could useful if you need to up your coolness ante…

Nick