Whether you are building a new website, or haven’t updated your current one in several years, it may be time to think about creating your website in a modern and relatable way. There are some hot trends in website design that will make your site more modern, more functional, and can give you an edge over your competition. And since you probably won’t be redesigning your site any time again soon, it’s best to go out of the gate with a strong site rooted in the most current best practices for optimal user experience.
Updated Design
Your home page visuals are your customers’ first impression of you. Gone are the days of multiple clicks required by your visitors to get to an interaction or engagement page. One page scrolling has gained in popularity, and modern visual treatments like parallax scrolling and full screen images are taking center stage with web designers looking to optimize user experience.
Parallax scrolling uses multiple backgrounds moving at different rates so that the image appears to be moving, creating a 3D affect. This design effect is very hot right now, as it gives movement to the page and quickly grabs attention. You can view examples of parallax design here http://www.awwwards.com/30-great-websites-with-parallax-scrolling.html.
Full screen images are also popular and are often used as background images to set the tone of the site. Most browsers now support fast loading of large images and seamlessly play high quality video often placed in the background. Consider incorporating this style into your site in a way that brings meaning to your product.
As websites become more simplified, many designs now hide the main menu navigation, making it visible only when hovered over. After many years of navigation bars dominating a web page, and commanding space on the left rail, it is a welcome trend to hide or collapse the main menu.
Interactive Storytelling
Although images and motion are taking center stage, it’s still very important to communicate who you are, what you stand for, and to provide information about your products and services in a way that your visitors will relate to them. Draw your customers in by adding stories through content, media and navigation that will connect them to your brand image. Tools like Readz will easily help you to combine different media like video, historical timelines, and imbedded PDFs to create modern, interactive storytelling design.
Card Design
Websites like Pinterest have set the standard for card design, also known as masonry design, which is a layout that is clean and organized and shows a product in a very visual way. By adding content such as prices, short descriptions and social media buttons, the card design is a very efficient and effective design display. Companies like Google and Keep.com use this approach to grab immediate attention and promote quick sales and social sharing.
Responsive Design & Mobile Optimization
It’s important to incorporate responsive design into any new website development. Responsive design is the automatic resizing of your web page as the browser window size increases or decreases, making the website responsive to any device, including mobile and tablets. While responsive design has been around since 2012, it’s really taken off as a standard practice in 2015.
Hand in hand with responsive design is your sites mobile optimization. It’s important to make sure your site is optimized for mobile devices, not just because of the tremendous shift in website traffic from desktop to mobile, but also because Google is now using mobile optimization as one of the factors they use in ranking your website for search results. Read our recent article on: Mobile Optimization here . Google wants their customers to have the best search experience, so they give priority to mobile optimized sites over those that are not. You can check out if your site is mobile friendly using Google’s tool here. https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/
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