Web Design Trends: Does it feel like your website doesn’t look as great as you’d hoped? When you open it, have you felt as if something is lacking, something just isn’t there? It could be any number of factors. The truth is that, for so many businesses, their website is absolutely crucial to their business. No matter what industry they’re in or the caliber of the work that they do, a great website is an absolute asset to a business. By that same token, a lacking website can be a problem indeed. Below are some of the best website design trends we’re noticing are popular this year.
What can’t be overstated, however, is the importance of a website itself. For a business, a website can be an office online, it can be the showroom, it can be the storefront, and so much more. A great website speaks well of a business. It shows the potential customer/client that this company can be trusted. Even if someone isn’t thinking that consciously, it’s in the back of their mind. A poor website, on the other hand, will deliver the opposite impression. For this reason and so many others, a website needs to be designed properly.
One of the most if not the most important web design trends right now, having a website that’s optimized for mobile devices is crucial to your company’s success. What it means to have a responsive, mobile optimized website is simple: it opens up and is fully functional on any kind of mobile device. That means phones, tablets, laptops, desktops, and everything else – if it’s something that a person could look for your website on, you want them to be able to open it there.
Why? Because more people use their phones/other devices to search for goods and services around them than computers. We can quote you all kinds of statistics, but just think about your own life: how often do you look for something on your phone versus looking for it with another device? Right. That alone shows you the importance of a site that’s mobile optimized.
In addition to your potential customers, Google takes mobile optimization very seriously. It’s important to them. The odds of your business ranking highly on Google for the keywords you want to rank for is low indeed if your site isn’t optimized for mobile devices. This is a trend that your website needs pronto.
Think of how long you’ll wait for a website to typically load. How long do you give it? Three seconds? Four? If you’re like most people, you aren’t waiting a whole lot longer than that before you’re giving up, clicking on something else, doing something else, etc. So, that alone lets you know just how important it is to have a site that’s designed to open fast.
Every moment that your site doesn’t load, every fraction of a second, you risk a potential customer/client giving up on your business and going somewhere else. That’s the last thing you want to have happen. A well designed website, one that’s been done by experienced professionals, can open quickly with full functionality.
That last part is also important. You want a potential customer/client to come to your site, yes, but you also probably want them to click on a few things and make a purchase. If your homepage loads but your site is difficult to navigate, or if the other links take a while to load/don’t load at all, then you’re less likely to close that deal. A site with a clearly-defined structure, with great UX/UI, has a real chance of lasting success.
You know how annoying videos that “pop up” when you open a site are. Obviously, you don’t want that. But, video marketing is important. You can have video on your site but you don’t want it to be off-putting, weird, poorly-designed, and so forth. Instead, you want to have a video that’s used properly. How can you do that? Having a video on your loading page.
It won’t “pop up” at all. Instead, it shows up in the page itself, used smartly when the page opens. That way, it’s not intrusive, surprising, or anything negative. Instead, it does everything that video marketing is supposed to do: showcasing what’s best about your business, making a human connection to potential customers, and so much more. Video is a powerful tool, yes, but it has to be handled properly.
Often, when people think of “web design trends,” they think of something aesthetic. Fonts, logos, flashing colors, cursors, pictures, all that manner of thing – that’s “web design” to many. All of that is critical. All of that is important to the success of your website. Again, to continue the analogy of your website as your office, you want to have an office that looks great, that people feel welcome in. That said, you need the right kind of aesthetic web design.
When someone asks “how would you design my site,” we tend to answer the question with a question: “how do you want your business to be perceived?” The most important trend in the aesthetics of web design is to make it fit your brand, your mission statement, who you are. That’s what your website should be: the personification of your business online. That’s an important web design trend during this time or any other.
The above are just some of the important trends in web design right now. However, many of them have been web design trends for a long time, too. That’s because they have a proven record of success. Mobile optimization, UX/UI, and more – those are going to be important today as well as tomorrow. Here at Red Rock Marketing, we can design a website that can help your business to not just grow, but to go to the next level. Schedule a consultation at our site or by giving us a call.