We are all more than aware of the impact having a good website can have on a business’s reputation, as it is the first point of information for any newcomer to a company. Equally, for any blogger or creative, your website and its design is a reflection of your taste and artistic direction: people may choose to work with you because they like how your site looks.
The boundaries of website design are constantly being pushed, with new elements constantly arising from technological evolution and the expanding limits of what our mobile devices can support. This means that to stay ahead of the game you need to keep your website or blog frequently updated and stay clued in with all the recent web design trends.
Simple changes with a big impact
Whether it’s rewriting your content to embrace a more humorous style or changing the stock photos on your site for more tailored ones, there are so many great ways you can take on the popular trends of the moment while still staying fully loyal to your brand ethos. Here we will take a look at some of the biggest web design trends of the year so far and the ways you can incorporate them into your own site or blog.
Animation and graphics
Gifs are no longer simply the reserve of social media. Widely used across a variety of digital marketing materials, they are a great way of capturing a site user’s attention. Taking this idea to the next level, a number of companies are even commissioning the creation of animations and custom illustrations to bring their sites alive while interweaving key elements of their branding. The addition of any kind of graphic can help to create a more diverse page layout and also boost page engagement too. Tools such as Vivify offer entire animation libraries for you to browse, making it easy to start incorporating these elements into your site.
Bold colors
There is a growing rebellion against the all-white ethos that dominated a lot of the designs in the early to mid-2010s. The appeal of empty space and single black lines is fading and instead people are looking for stylish patterns and bold colors. Indeed, this year we expect to see an explosion of bright color hit both websites and typography. Custom fonts with creative display make titles shout, while saturated complementary colors that grab the eye are now dominating headers everywhere and even being used as homepage backgrounds.
Ecommerce
It’s a well-known fact that the ecommerce industry has been booming over the last decade, and it shows no signs of stopping. Online users now have a certain expectation that they should be able to make online purchases from pretty much anywhere and in a safe, user-driven environment. If you can bring this kind of opportunity to your own business or blog, there is a high chance people will start taking advantage of it. Adding a webstore to your existing site is easy as more and more web companies, like 1&1, offer website building and hosting specifically tailored to ecommerce needs.
Mobile first
There is no doubt that all things web are increasingly orientated around the mobile experience. Google’s announcement it was rolling out mobile-first indexing is the proof that those unwilling to join the movement will get left behind. No matter how good your site looks on desktop, if it is not mobile compatible, and even if it still offers optimal speed and functionality, it will simply fall out of favor with both users and Google.
