Over the years, web design trends have come a long way with creative agencies using innovative techniques to keep websites engaging, aesthetic and free of clutter. Great web design and user experience is a combination of evolving technology and visual appeal that keeps visitors engaged. Modern websites take all their elements and the layout working together to present a well-structured web page to make the most of popular style aspects like colorful flat illustrations, minimalistic design and better navigation. Let’s take a look at these web design trends that will make all the difference for your business.
1. Combining Photos and Illustrations
One design trend that will always stay in vogue is the combination of photos or images with simple 2D illustrations. Using this technique, web designers either replace sections of the image or over-write over photos to bring out the best of both elements with a fun mixture. This not only improves the aesthetics of your web page but also gives you sufficient room to provide relevant information about your products and services. This process is made easier by using one of the best website builder for small business.
2. Using Dark Themes
Many websites today are going to ‘the dark side’ to create a rather ultra-modern and chic web design that’s easy on the eyes. Having a dark background on your webpage really makes other design elements pop, adding to the overall aesthetics of your site. What’s more, the images, artwork and effects you add to the page have more gravitas against a solid black background.
3. Using GIFs to Add Graphic Details
To make your website stand out, consider adding GIFs on your page instead of static photos. Up your graphics game with GIFs breaking up the monotony of your web page, making it more interactive and engaging. Create page content using these interactive graphics to add to the aesthetic of your website. Ensure that you don’t overdo it as too many graphics can harm your site’s loading speed. For this, compress the graphics to avoid affecting page load time.
4. Integrating Social Media Platforms
If you run an online retail store, adding social media integrations to your website will do wonders for your sales. Customers can directly connect with you via social platforms. This helps boost your rate of conversions while reducing your bounce rate significantly. Work with a good social media marketing agency to seamlessly integrate all your social channels into your website.
Pro Tip: Integrate your website with Instagram so the images from the platform add a pop of color on your web page.
5. Seeking Inspiration from Retro Web Design Trends
The year 2020 has experienced a real ‘history-repeats-itself’ moment with retro and vintage web design trends being all the rage. These styles inspired by the ‘50s and ‘60s are creating quite a wave with classic black and white images, faded colors, vintage typography and more! With vintage themes making their digital comeback, web design trends inspired by old-timey television and magazines never looked better!
6. Using Monochrome Tones
One web design trend that has gained popularity this year is the black and white theme. Many web designers are opting for monochrome tones for designing, using grayscale images to create a very sleek and crisp looking website. The focus here is to be minimalistic with the designing by creating a clutter-free page and peppering it with line art elements for added effect.
7. Using a Combination of Artistic and Design Elements
Modern web design trends are all about using illustrations to create a great web page. When designing a web page, web designers use beautiful artwork made from both pastel and watercolors to create a masterpiece with different hues. Today web design trends are all about using quirky artwork with unique characters to make the web page stand out.
8. Adding Motion Effects and 3D
3D has become an intrinsic aspect of web and graphic designing. You can mix this up by adding motion effects to your web page to make it more appealing and interactive. If the effects you use on your websites are engaging, they will be more than enough to keep visitors stay longer on the page. This way, you can reduce your bounce rate and improve other page metrics.
9. Creating Simple and Straightforward Navigation
It’s the age of smartwatches as an increasing number of people are using them to explore the digital world. If users will be navigating on such small and compact devices, then web designers need to ensure that the web pages have straightforward navigation.
Easy navigation is key to not only great user experience but also good web design. Web designers have to eliminate the difficulty of usability as they accommodate minimalist navigation on extremely small screens.
10. Using Web-Friendly Typography
You should know that not all font styles are 100% device or browser friendly. Your creative web design agency needs to experiment and test the font styles before rolling the website. Or, you could simply ask them to stick to fonts that work like Tahoma, sans-serif and Arial. There are more web-friendly fonts that you can use but you’ll need to do your research before you settle on something.
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Choose a web-safe font so that you can concentrate better on your core services and products. Go for something with minimal text, lot of white space and eye-catching imagery.
The Bottom Line
Now that the age of digitalization is here in its entirety, businesses need to ensure that they leverage the evergreen web design trends to stay ahead of the competition. You don’t necessarily need to pull all the stops to make a great website. Just making a few obvious elements work for you will help you reap great results in terms of conversions, sales and profitability.
Consider redesigning and updating your website while routinely performing tweaks to make the overall performance more optimized, responsive and result-driven.