Interactive web design is the part of web design where small things — a hover state, an animated transition, a scroll-triggered reveal — change how the user feels about the page. Done well, the page feels alive without being chaotic. Done badly, the page is a showreel for the designer at the expense of the customer trying to buy something.
The patterns worth borrowing for Irish small-business sites — and the ones to avoid.
Worth borrowing
- Subtle scroll-triggered reveals. Sections that fade in as they enter the viewport. Cheap to implement, looks polished, doesn't hurt conversion.
- Considered hover states on calls-to-action. A button that changes colour and gains a faint shadow on hover signals "yes, this is clickable." The opposite — a button that does nothing on hover — signals "I might be clickable, I don't know."
- Smooth in-page anchor scrolling. When a navigation link jumps to a section, animating the scroll instead of teleporting helps the reader understand what just happened.
- Loading skeletons for any content that takes more than half a second to load. Better than a spinner; preserves layout.
- Sticky navigation on long pages. Small, unobtrusive, lets people get back to the menu without scrolling to the top.
Avoid these
- Custom cursors. Almost always pretentious. Almost always slow. Universally hated by readers who use accessibility tools.
- Full-page WebGL animations as the homepage hero. Slow to load, terrible on mobile, breaks accessibility, hurts SEO. Save WebGL for portfolio pieces, not for the homepage of a business that needs to convert.
- Horizontal scrolling on the homepage. People expect vertical scrolling. Horizontal scrolling for content (not for image galleries) causes immediate bounces.
- Auto-playing video with sound. Worse than ever in 2026 — most browsers mute it by default, and the user feels mocked.
- Animations that block interaction. If the user can't click the call-to-action because an entrance animation is still playing, you've prioritised the designer's portfolio over the customer's task.
The 2026 conversation
Three things have changed since this article was first written in 2018:
- Page speed budget. Google has tightened Core Web Vitals scoring further. Fancy interactions that hurt Largest Contentful Paint or Cumulative Layout Shift cost ranking. The boring choice (text-based hero, image-based hero) often wins on Core Web Vitals over the fancy choice.
- Reduced-motion preferences. macOS, Windows and iOS all let users opt out of motion. Sites that respect
prefers-reduced-motion: reducewith sensible static fallbacks reach a much wider audience than those that don't. - AI-generated mock-ups have flooded "inspiration" galleries. Sites like Awwwards and Dribbble are full of designs that look great in a screenshot but were never built or maintained. Inspiration galleries should be sanity-checked against live sites that have run for a year.
For Irish small businesses specifically
The interactive choices that genuinely help an Irish small-business site:
- A clean hover state on phone-call links so people on desktop know they're clickable
- An accordion FAQ section that expands inline rather than navigating to a new page
- A scroll-progress indicator on long-form articles
- Carefully chosen micro-animations on form fields (a green checkmark when an email validates) that signal correctness
Notable absence: nothing in that list is "fancy." The fanciest interactions on a small-business site should be invisible until the user does something specific.
How to commission this
If you're commissioning a new site, ask the studio to show you the slowest page on each of their last three project sites — measured in real terms by PageSpeed Insights. The studios that have a good answer treat performance as a feature; the studios that don't can't show you. Our partner studio digitaldesign.ie publishes Lighthouse scores on its case studies for exactly this reason.
Read next
- Web design and user experience: where small businesses go wrong
- Web design trends Irish small businesses should pay attention to
Need this kind of work done?
The Marketing Pod is editorial only. For Irish web design, e-commerce or digital marketing engagements we recommend our partner Dublin studio.