In the ever evolving web design industry, you can’t always expect things to stay still. There will be a constant upgrade of new and stimulating concepts, tools and methodologies. Credit goes to the genuine, creative minds who keep rejuvenating industry with fresh yet challenging norms. They come up with the most innovative style every time. If you are among the people who are interested in web design – whether through marketing or online business- you should be sharp-sighted about every industry update so to match the competitive pace.
In the contemplation of making the creation of professional website easy, we all focus on the newest trends and styles introduced in the industry.
But, will that alone work? If your answer is Yes, you are likely to be vulnerable to the mistakes that most business owners do in the rushed state. What are those mistakes? How to escape from such issues? All of this might be tinkering in your head now. Well, you are again making a mistake. Don’t Panic and sit back relax!
Coming back to our discussion, the point was to make you aware of the other side as well. Take this instance from the business point of view (you will get more clarity). You might have heard words of wisdom that – Follow your competitors so that you can identify the things that you missed out. At the same time, it is also advised to follow the mistakes of your competitors. Quite obvious and clear, you are not supposed to repeat them but to keep a solution in hand (if any such problem or situation hinders your way to achieving business goals).
Similarly, when you will have a clear vision about the things that can enhance your business growth along with the ones that can have the blemishing effect, you will be able to make a productive approach. As we all know web design industry is dynamic in nature, sticking on the trends that were followed the previous year is not sensible. This post is to sensitise you about the newest trends of 2016 that are good for your website along with the ones that can be bad and even ugly.
Starting off with the discussion, make sure your website comprises of following good components:
1) Graphic Text can illuminate Your Website Design
Be ready to experience a lot of creative usability of text that will embrace textures, images and patterns. Typography, at all times, has been considered as a vital component for making or breaking the appeal of the web design, but it will now take a leap in overall looks of the site due to the inception of artistic text and other graphic elements. Mix and match different texts with relevant graphics and amaze onlookers with your innovative senses.
2) Make the Design Completely Customer Centric
It is quite an understood thing – why the web design idea that is guided by the needs of customers stands successful. In-fact, this self-explanatory idea is now taken up as a significant consideration in the designing process. Making web design customer-centric fosters designers as well as site owners to conjure up an image of customer’s journey through their website and this helps them to optimise the site for making the journey better and smooth. After all, the sole motive of designing a website is to reach prospective clients. So, the focus should be on catering them the way they like to keep them happily engaged on your website.
3) Content should be in Proper Alignment
It has been forecasted that centered content will be the most powerful style that will become ubiquitous for the designs of the homepage. This means placing the important piece of information of the page right in the middle of the screen, surrounding the same with smooth textures or striking visuals to give it a dramatic effect. This works as a brilliant solution for the pages that want to target a minimal amount of content.
So, whenever you want to make maximum from short pieces of content, make use of intensifying elements that can make the entire page visually attractive to the visitors. For Example – If you have a website for sports accessories and you want the mentioned two-liner content to be displayed on the homepage
“Delivering the most extensive range of sports accessories to gear up real enthusiasts with real tools to mark the success in their very own style”
You can add an image of the accessories or image of the players with highlighted accessories so as to make an impressive statement on the visitors, compelling them to explore the products you are offering. There is a chance that they will end up making a purchase due to the influence that your first page has made.
Remember, you should use good quality images that can express the very idea of words in clear and concise manner.
4) Splitting Content can lift Up Visual Appeal
The split content layout gives a facelift to the pages that carry more substance in addition to the centrally aligned striking content-light pages. Split content, basically divides the screen into broad sections unlike the box-style followed by Pinterest. Considerably, the look of each individual section may vary, not being highlighted by a common aesthetic tone. This implies an advantage for designers as they get ample of space for their creativity without impacting the clarity of content placement.
It is more like placing your content into hierarchical mannered sections, each of which is uniquely and creatively designed.
5) Iconography and Custom Illustrations can add More Vibrancy
HD monitors have busted the fact how standard image format are not always workable as per the expectations of the modern web. Using image files of .jpg and .png format can often give a pixelated appearance to the retina displays that will ultimately spoil the website’s aesthetics.
In the modern-day environment, using the icons fonts and Scalable Vector Graphics are the best way to deal with the headaches of retina displays. This is the reason, most of the web designs appear as the reflection of bright custom illustrations along with the twist of truly stylish SVG icons and hand-drawn icons that never fail in terms of crispiness and beauty – regardless of the screen resolution.
Now that you know – how you can prettify your website with the use of some improved and some newly introduced tools and techniques, designing won’t be that difficult. However, there are a number of trends that might be adversely affecting your website looks. There is a chance that you have followed any such trend for your website. Let’s have discussion about some commonly spread bad trends of the industry:
1) A Page with Too-Long of Scrolling
Responsive design and the dominance of Facebook has ended up making long scrolling a standard trend for the web design. It cannot be denied that this type of page layout definitely has a plenty of advantages and has been used in many distinctively designed websites. However, it has been discovered that this is something way too long. Unwearying scrolling with the unjust division of content into small-big sections, extensively animated scrolling effects are nothing but some risks to design a page having no end in sight. This is why it is preferred to become a visitor before a designer to define any particular element – be it entire page, its layout or pieces of information in it.
2) Keeping the Navigation Menu Hidden
Another element that came into existence after the success of the mobile design is hidden navigation, which wraps up the entire menu into a single icon (more commonly referred as the Hamburger Menu) that opens up once clicked. This goes perfectly well with the mobile devices, where every single bit of space is of supreme importance, but the progressive presence of hidden navigation on large-size websites can actually hamper the usability of the website. An ideal way to get success in web design is to simply avoid the unnecessary glitches. Keeping the navigation menu hidden and putting an additional click in the visitor’s experience is more likely a textbook definition of what you call complication or unnecessary glitch.
3) Placing Elements over Elements
Does placing a text over an image, which is placed on a shape, which is again placed on an image, supported by a pattern background and a conflicting colour base – makes any sense? It is simply a chaos. Just have one thing clear in mind; the only way to make your design look great is placing things in the coherent manner that implies to avoid extensive and offensive layering.
To cut short, overlapping the elements could result into a chaotic arrangement that as a result distracts visitors instead of attracting.
4) Introductory Welcome Page of Website
Society is becoming reconciled to a serious problem. Websites are made to gain too much of weight (Load). While there is an urgent need to address this concern – that can be done by cutting the content short, people are making the scenario more disguised by opening up their site with an introduction page to greet the visitors till the time the chubby site loads slowly. What’s the point of it? You really think this will work? The reality is – Instead of attracting your visitors; you are simply pushing them away with the addition of extra pages to their visual experience. Sometimes it’s good to be on a content diet.
In fact, keeping content limited, concise and clear will be much more influential for impressing visitors. So, try conveying your message within specific word limit and going through the website won’t be a painstaking thing anymore.
5) Carousels on the Front Page could be Destructive
It is quite common to notice the use of carousels on the websites. It is arguably true that they can enhance the visual impact of the website, reducing the clutter. But at the same time, it’s overwhelming use has resulted into making sites look quite a similar. There are lot of other negative impacts of using carousels like:
- They are not good for SEO: Lesser content means it can be difficult to get meta-information about the page. This will take up the keyword information from the page implying a serious attack on your SEO strategies especially. In short, use of carousels can devalue the keywords.
- They make an adverse impact on Performance: Carousels comprises of high-resolution images that cannot be properly optimised and as a result, could slow down the loading time of the homepage – which is often the most important page of the site and should load at its earliest. The sliders of carousels can increase the performance headaches as they make of jQuery and Javascript.
- They push down the Content below the Fold: Though the content above the fold is not as significant as it was, Google still not recommend pushing the content at the bottom of the page. While the search engine giant recommends keeping the ad content above the fold, carousels fail to offer much in terms of value to the user.
- Inaccessibility is often a serious Concern: It has been observed that even the best frameworks find it quite difficult to resolve the accessibility issues that confines carousels as there are ample to handle.
So, don’t ever compromise in terms of UX and accessibility with the use of carousels. If you still find them workable, make sure they are precisely crafted and you are solution-ready if encountered with any fall backs.
After the good and bad ones, let’s have insights about the things that can make exploring website an ugly experience for the visitors:
1) Including Excessive of Apps
It’s really awesome that site owners can make use of third-party tools and apps to harmonise the site, but again exceeded limit can trouble you. It is always tempting to get more and more functionalities. The one thing to keep in mind is that all the tools available for ease are designed individually by completely different minds. Their style could be completely different and if you are using numerous apps per page, you can’t avoid the aesthetic conflict.
Therefore, it is always preferable to integrate lesser and highly useful apps to save aesthetic as well as functionality conflicts or the worst case- severe crashes.
2) Deep Dream Program from Google
Google has introduced a creepy psychedelic universe that has drove inspiration among folks to design scary things. For now, it’s only in the news feed that you see the unusual pictures of animals, big scary eyes. These twisted visuals are not equally good to be incorporated on websites.
So, you have the whole list in hand now. Hope this will help you make a strategic plan to execute your web design project. Even if you want to revamp the existing design, this checklist is sure to get you towards the right direction.
Author Bio
Creativity and Innovation with a Simplistic approach is what makes Kristy Bernales a perfectionist at her job. She is currently working with WDX Professional Web Design Melbourne as Sr. Designer. Whenever she feel exhausted, she prefers to go on expeditions especially the ones close to nature for rejuvenating her senses.