Updated September 2026: revisited every site on the list. Eleven are still online; nine new ones replace the eight that had gone.
In today’s technology, designers have been creatively adding interactive elements to websites in bizarre and unique ways, in this article, we will be showing 20 cool interactive websites that we’ve collected just for you. So grab a comfy chair, sit back and let’s take a look at 20 cool interactive websites.
The Deep Sea
Neal Agarwal’s The Deep Sea is one long scroll from the surface right down to the ocean floor, with each creature placed at the depth where it actually lives.
The interaction is nothing more than scrolling, but the sheer length of the page makes you feel the depth in a way a diagram never could.
His whole site, neal.fun, is full of small interactive ideas like this one, worth a browse if this one grabs you.
HireBasis
Radio Garden
Spin a 3D globe and tune in to live radio stations wherever you stop, from a village station to a capital city.
It turns the world’s radio into something you actually want to explore, a nice example of navigation being the content rather than just a menu to get past.
My grandmother’s lingo:
This site teaches you words of Marra, an Australian Aboriginal language that is slowly being forgotten. By using your microphone, you learn how to speak phrases in marra in order to progress through the website.
As you learn more about marra you also learn about the story and motivation behind the website.
At the end of the website, you are taken to the map of Australia, giving you the option to share Mother’s Lingo to help keep the language alive.
This site holds a method of interaction that is not only engaging but uses it in such a way that helps support the cause. With the combination of interaction, animation and beautiful style it’s definitely worth checking out.
WindowSwap
Open a window somewhere else in the world. WindowSwap shows you the view from a real person’s window, filmed by them, and you can share your own.
One button, no menus, no game to win – proof that an interactive site can be calm instead of clever.
30 pieces, 30 species:
30 pieces, 30 species builds awareness by building thirty endangered species with 30 pieces that can form each animal by scrolling or enabling the site to cycle through each animal.
You can then choose one of the 30 animals and find out more about its date of discovery, history of its population, a video about the animal and a link leading to another website that tries to help with the option of inviting you to join the cause.
If you’re a fan of graphic design and helping endangered animals this website is up your alley with its unique style and animation.
Amur Tiger Center
An autonomous non-commercial organization established for preserving the Amur tiger population, this website educates you with facts about the Amur tiger, what the condition the population is in and showing projects that the organization is doing to help preserve the Amur tigers as you scroll through and watch the content unfold itself.
One section of the website called About Amur Tiger is illustrated by beautiful animated paintings like a moving storybook.
For younger users, there is a mini-game page where you play hide and seek with a group of cartoon animals, a fun, and educative game to help children understand the Amur tiger.
Overall the website is set up well with a goal to protect magnificent animals.
Mapstd:
A tower defense game where you can choose where to defend anywhere in the world using Google maps, it plays like a traditional tower defense game where you place different colored pins to defend your base from incoming enemies and survive for as long as you can when the odds are slowly against you with each round.
You can change the layout of the map to the traditional Google maps layout, satellite or water colored, personally the watercolor layout looks the most fun to play on.
It’s a fun little time waster and with the whole world to play on you have many choices to play and defend.
Wake It Up:
A funny website that starts out with a mini-game where the aim is to wake up your web browser by using files like loud music or throwing an image file of a slipper in its face before time runs out, the website was created to promote animation to help bring the website to life.
The animation for each file you interact with makes the experience rather fun when you see the web browser’s reaction and attempts to go back to sleep.
Definitely worth visiting the website and trying to wake up the browser.
Noisli:
This is a good website to use if you trouble to focus on work or trying to relax, simple style but super customizable.
The style isn’t the most complicated because the website itself isn’t supposed to be.
The symbols for each audio to choose from gives the idea of what the sound will be, and with its adjustable dials, you can create the right atmosphere for you to help focus your mind on work or even relaxing after work.
Quick, Draw!
Google’s little game asks you to doodle an object in under twenty seconds while a neural network tries to guess what it is.
It’s fun, it explains how machine learning works without a word of jargon, and every doodle you draw helps train the model a little further.
Kolmården Zoo:
Kolmården is a large forest that separates the Swedish provinces of Södermanland and Östergötland, their website introduces a 3D render of the view to show what they can offer for visitors.
Moving around different areas of the zoo lets you find out about all the animals they have in the preserve, as well as other attractions like roller coasters and a children’s play park.
It’s easy to navigate and a fun to look at with its Sims esque style with the combination of photos of the zoo.
Update, September 2026: the map has moved to kolmarden.com/karta and is now a flat, filterable map rather than the 3D render described above.
Chrome Music Lab
A set of simple experiments that let anyone, of any age, play with how music works: rhythm, melody, sound waves and more.
Each little experiment is a lesson in making a complicated idea playable with nothing more than a click.
Big Drop:
Big Drop is a web design agency that focuses on making each design unique and personal for their clients. As you scroll down the homepage you get to watch images on the screen with squash and stretches.
Other little interactions are the thumbnails of the agency’s past work, when you move the mouse over the portfolio you can see the thumbnails shift round within its frame.
But what makes this website special is when you look at the top of the page and see a button that says request a quote, when you hover over the button it swings from side to side.
Like a set of blinders, you pull down on the button and reveals a contact form to request a quote.
This is quite a creative way to use animation and implement it into a web design.
Patatap
Press a key, or tap the screen on your phone, and Patatap fires off a sound with a burst of moving shapes.
Keep going and without really trying you’re composing a little audio-visual performance. Fair warning: it contains flashing images.
The Pudding
The Pudding explains ideas through visual essays: stories built from charts and small interactions that you scroll through, tap and play with rather than just read.
If you’re into data visualisation this is a great one to bookmark and come back to.
Black Negative:
Another web design agency that offers a unique experience in UX, by dragging the entire website left and right to see it’s content you see beautifully laid out pages, each with unique styles and interactions, showcasing past work.
Not a lot to say but it’s creative and pretty to look at and you should visit this site.
(Un)trafficked:
In order to spread awareness about human trafficking in India, Bharat Yatra created this interactive story where you make choices to save a character from trafficking and in this story it shows how you can’t always successfully save someone.
In a way, this sums up how cruel some parts of the world can be, which is why you should take a look at this site and share with your loved ones.
The Scale of the Universe 2
Cary Huang’s classic zooms you out from the smallest things we know of all the way to the size of the observable universe, one object at a time.
A simple slider carries all of that scale, and it’s available in more languages than you’d expect.
Lusion
Lusion is a studio that builds 3D, immersive, interactive websites for brands, and its own site is the showcase.
Worth a look just to see how far a browser can be pushed these days.
From our 2017 list: Wava, Polish Christmas Guide, Nurture, Inside Abbey Road, Envato Elements (redesigned since), Wind and Words, Unreal Mission and Chekhov are gone, redirected or couldn’t be found again.
Were there any interactive websites that we’ve missed? Let us know, who knows, we might add it in a future article.
Want to build sites like these? Our Web Design course is private, one-to-one, in Bangkok or online, on your schedule, and the Web Design Bootcamp is a 12-week full-time course in Bangkok that goes all the way to launch.
