A good website design company with integrity stays on top of design trends to create websites that are modern not just in visual appeal, but also in functionality and programming. This is all done to extend a website’s shelf life in order to maximize a client’s investment.
Of course, every business and their project is different and will need a custom solution, so the highlighted trends below are general ideas to keep in mind.
What’s In for 2011 and going forward:
- Image sliders (or any kind of rotating image on the home page) – For the client that wants to deliver multiple messages or showcase several products within limited home page real estate, this solution works wonders. Technically, it’s relatively affordable, fast and easy to implement.
- Clean and Simple – The trend is even more “clean and simple” in design than has been seen in the past.
- Hard edges and corners – Simple squares and rectangles to shape blocks of copy or images are trend forward in 2011, although, clean, rounded corners are still modern.
- Lots of white space – “Less is more” provides more breathing room to add focal points to the page.
- Typography – Put more design into headlines and sub headlines to draw in the eye to your leading message(s).
- Big typography – Bigger headlines, bigger font is trend-forward design, brought on by hand-held devices with smaller viewing screens.
- Google Fonts – This invention is a dream-come-true for the website creative team that wants both great design and good search engine optimization. In the past the “good,” more stylized fonts could only be developed as graphics, therefore not readable by search engines. With Google fonts, you get both nice font styles and search engine readability.
- Large pictures or images – Create visual focus and show the eye where you want it to go within the first couple of seconds of viewing.
- Blog-formatted news sections – These are in more now than ever. Even if your prospects don’t read your website articles, search engines do and those keyword-relevant articles do count in SEO.
- “Deep” design – Over 65% of computer users now do their viewing on monitor screens 1024 x 767 or larger. So give these larger-screen-viewing people something of value to look at the bottom of their screen and maximize your available home page real estate.
- Texture – Add shadows and background images to create texture for the sense of sight to “see” and the sense of touch to “feel.”
- Light colors or colors with bright or bold contrast – Light colors, including pastels, white, and two-tone, dominate modern web design.
- Bigger “rollover” dynamic navigation – The navigation buttons gets bigger and more detailed with large drop-down menus that offer up page overviews, descriptions and thumbnail photos.
- Social media integration – Website-featured Facebook and Twitter linked buttons are becoming so popular in business to consumer web design, that the question becomes not if they should be included, but if there is a valid reason not to include them.
- CSS3 and HTML5 technologies – these two technologies become the new basic standards to aim for in business web design.
- Content management Solutions – CMS, particularly WordPress, find their way full-blown into large, high-end design, custom websites. With its June 2010 release, WordPress isn’t for just blogging anymore.
- Large footers – Integrated into the site design, footers at the bottom of a web page add more function and navigation ease, and are no longer limited to a handful of words.
What’s out or on its way out:
- Busy designs
- Grunge
- The “box” look
- Flash
- “Heavy”
- 3D
- Gradient effects
- Dated code or technology solutions
- Flash
