There’s an old saying that goes: “The trend is your friend. Embrace it.”. No truer words have been spoken about web design trends. The fast-paced world of website development means that if you don’t embrace the right trends, you’ll likely be left chasing your competitors.
And that’s a race in which you don’t want to be in second place. We’ll explain why keeping pace with web site design trends is so important.
What Makes Trends So Important?
The reason that any web designer pays attention trends is because they matter most when users come to a website. If a visitor goes online and comes across two websites in the same niche – e.g. “website design services” – they’re likely to spend more time on the site that has a more trend-setting design, than one that looks like it hasn’t been updated in 5-years.
Must Embrace Website Designing Trends
So, what are some of the trends that have really taken off, and why should you have your website designing agency consider them – if they haven’t already. – for your website? Well, that list of trends to befriend is pretty long, but we’ll take a closer look at five of them that you should embrace:
Mobilize Mobile
After more than a year and a half of testing and experimenting, Google announced the launch of its Mobile-First Indexing initiative in 2018. Typically, when you worked with your design team, because most of your “heavy lifting” back office work was done on desktops, your web designer focused on creating desktop versions of your website. Well, guess what? That trend is still alive, but won’t be for long.
With Mobile-First Indexing, Google aims to give mobile website design a priority in its searches – especially if your visitor or potential customer is using a mobile device. Since a larger percentage (52.2% by one estimate) of web pages are now served to mobile devices, it makes sense for your web designer to embrace the trend of mobile-friendly design too.
Responsibly Responsive
Way back in 2010, Google initiated a liking for responsive web design. The idea is that the search engine uses its BOTS and Crawlers to sniff out what device your visitor is using, and then responds by serving up a rendition of a page that’s appropriate for that device.
So, how does your website designer make that magic work? Well, he/she essentially serves up the same website code to every device – desktop, tablet, smartphone or smartwatch. The code then senses what device it is being viewed by, and dynamically adjusts the web page properties accordingly.
Combined with Mobile-First Indexing, responsive design can be leveraged by your web design agency to put your website front and centre – ahead of those of competitor sites, in Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). That means query results will how your website on top, before those of other websites in the same niche as yours.
Lightning Speed
Which brings us to the next website designing trend that’s quickly catching fire. It takes only 8-seconds to catch a web surfers’ attention. If your website can’t do that, you’ll lose a potential client. With so much content consumed “on the go”, mobile users are impatient to get what they are looking for – fast. – or they’ll move on to a competitor’s site and find it.
So, how do you infuse lightning speed into your website? Well, your web design service will probably have a few tricks up their sleeves. Typically, they’ll design a “lite version” of your website just for mobile consumption. With less heavy-graphics and image-based content, this approach to web designing ensures faster page load times and more efficient page refreshes.
Maximize Minimalism
You’ve often heard of a web page being “too busy” to give you anything of value. Well, web designing services heard those complaints and came up with an approach to address that challenge. They call it minimalism, and its adoption is trending higher, both on desktops and mobile devices.
With minimalist site design, your web designing agency strips off all the unnecessary bells and whistles from their design, and creates a clean, uncluttered website that visitors will want to come back to – over…and over…and over again.
Minimalism is not a new concept. In fact, back in the day it had another name: The KIS Principle. Keep It Simple. KIS web site design not only feeds into the previous three trends that we spoke about, but it complements and enhances them to a new level.
Personally Personalize
When it comes to being served, no one likes the cookie cutter approach. We all love it when we receive personalised attention…and web surfers love it too. And that’s a trend that all web design services are embracing.
By customising your webpages to the tastes and personalities of your individual visitor, you’re likely to keep them around longer than 8-seconds to close the deal. More importantly, because your personalised web site design makes them feel welcomed, they’ll come back over and over to get more of it.
The Race To Embrace
Does that mean you have to embrace whatever trend is being advertised? Absolutely NOT. And that’s what differentiates trend-savvy web design services from the “ordinary” players. They know exactly what’s worth embracing, and what’s worth staying away from.
Some trends aren’t really trends, but just passing fads. If you move too quickly to jump on a bandwagon without knowing where it’s headed, you’ll likely still end up far behind your competitor. You should work with your web designing agency to understand which trends are worth adopting, and then race to embrace it before others do.
