In this era of Web 2.0, it’s inexcusable for seasoned web-owners to simply have a site consisting of text and images. Unless you want your website to wither away in some forgotten, cobweb-covered corner of the Internet, it needs to be interactive and have multimedia content.

Why do you need to be interactive? The answer is simple. With the capability of almost anyone to create and upload websites, images, contents, and many types of other information, the World Wide Web has become jam-packed with too much data—too much that they’re being produced much faster than people can view and take in this sudden influx of data.

Almost every popular website nowadays includes content that enables its users to interact with the owner, with each other, and form a community. That is the genius behind social-networking sites, and why so many people flock to each and every one of them no matter how many similar sites with similar themes and benefits crop up almost on a daily basis.

But not all websites need to rely so much on people making online relationships in their portals. It’s unnecessary in most cases, especially if your website was not made for that purpose. However, it doesn’t mean that user interaction would be minimized. There are hundreds of other ways on how your web visitors will enjoy and keep coming back to your website.

If you own a website about your company, one way to make it interactive is to present your products or services in a way that people can explore more about them. Create games, online movies, animations for your product. Create an interesting interface for your portfolio or gallery. Make sure to address to each of the five senses to be able to present an all-around experience, and maximize the visitor’s satisfaction. Apply video, music and sound—if the images you portray are convincing enough, a virtual sense of taste and feel will follow. For this, you would definitely need to make use of Flash. Invest in Adobe Flash and Adobe Photoshop, and maybe get a PSD2FLA plug-in as well, they’re useful tools not only for web designing purposes but also for creating various multimedia content.

Speaking of tools, SiteGrinder is another which will absolutely make your life easier, especially if you’re hard-pressed for time and have a million things to create, upload, check and tweak; at least the layout designing process will be a breeze. SiteGrinder converts into coded HTML and CSS the web layout you designed in Photoshop, saving you the time and effort that you would normally expend should you decide to encode everything manually.

Not only corporate or commercial sites can benefit from being interactive by using the tools above, even personal, non-profit and for-fun sites can make use of them too, and maybe help increase traffic and such. If anything, adding multimedia content will positively give your website an edge, and will make every visitor feel that each minute they spend on your site is well-worth it.