Building an ordinary website is not that easy as creating an effective online marketing tool with a modern design. A nice-looking and well-optimized site requires a lot of time, investments, and even inspiration. So, how to create a good website design in order attract more clients?
According to the Internet Live Stats, there are more than 1.2 billion websites worldwide. Every second this value becomes higher for about 10 units. Whatever industry you work in, your website has to match modern requirements in both technological and design aspects. In this blog post, we will focus on an external view of websites and how they are supposed to look like in 2017. Bright, colorful, and fussy fonts were considered to be outdated long time ago. Icons have replaced images to help users navigate through a menu easier. Though, these facts hardly can surprise anyone in our time. Continue reading and you will learn how a modern site will have to look like in the close future.
1. Mobile First, Desktop Second
A mobile-first approach in website development has been existing for more than 5 years. This is obviously not a new trend, but it is worth noting here as it has become obligatory for any business owner if he or she strives to generate sales using this marketing channel. What does a mobile-first approach mean?
It is the web development with a primary focus on mobile devices. Using a responsive design is quite logical after reviewing the official statistics published by StatCounter, an independent web analytics company. According to its data, the percentage of the Internet browsing by mobile devices is now 51.3%. This is exactly the reason why Google has dropped its Instant Search. This feature was available to desktop users and showed search results as people typed them. With a bigger traffic, business owners can get more sales.That is why focusing on a wider audience makes sense
2. Hidden Navigation
We all might have heard that fewer clicks it takes to perform an action, the higher conversion will be. Despite this fact, modern website homepage design often contains a hidden pop-up menu that appears after clicking on a «hamburger». Such a solution is based on a responsive design approach when it is necessary to place a menu in the way to make it look properly on mobile devices. Traditional website navigation, which contains elements placed at the top of a page, takes too much space and limits possibilities to hold user attention with a meaningful content. Creating a hidden navigation discovers another benefit that allows to build a more attractive and effective homepage. Check it out below.
3. Roomy First Screen
A pop-up menu creates an extra space on the first screen of a homepage. It allows to highlight main company’s advantages with a bigger font and more attractive icon to catch user attention. The era of «the more information, the better» has gone. It is important to lead a user in a flowing way along the path where the destination point is a successful conversion. A wider space provides designers with a possibility to implement their best website homepage ideas that will make this marketing channel more attractive and unique. A modern first screen has to look like a full-wide background image with several soft colors where navigation areas can be easily recognized and read by users. This is a current trend in styling a website main page.
4. Highlighted Navigation Areas
A hidden menu and a roomy first screen allow to create a design that will focus on several main navigation elements that will help users to make a decision faster and easier. Such an approach prompts users to navigate through necessary steps instead of making them waste time to find out where to look for a needed link. Due to a roomy first screen, it is possible to highlight these elements by using bigger fonts and leaving more space between them in order to make content look better and easier to read.
5. Material Design Lite
The Material Design has become an essential continuation of a flat design that is known as a commonly used trend during the past few years. The Android-based design was created as an interface for mobile devices, but now, it has fully conquered desktops. This visual approach makes usability a main component of the whole design. The Material Design Lite (MDL) is the next generation of Material Design. It includes guidelines, layout sets, and an overall framework with tools that allow any designer to create an MDL site fast and easy using a convenient palette sample.
6. Large Icons
The popularity of icons in a website design is can be easily explained by the fact that people retain 65% of visual information after three days and only 10-20% of written or spoken one. Therefore, it is easier for a human brain to process images than text. It is worth noting that the icon has to match the text it is connected to avoid confusing users. Annoying images with people having hypertrophied mimics have become outdated. Icons also have to be vector-based to look properly on any device.
A list of requirements for icon usage in web design:
- The icon should be suitable to content.
- It has to express a crisp message.
- It must be vector-based.
- It has to be comprehensive being small or large
Let’s proceed to the latest website design trends in fonts and colors.
7. Simple Fonts and Soft Palette
Toxic colors in a web design stopped being popular about fifteen years ago. Now, designers tend to use from three to five bright hues in their palettes to create a nice-looking site. In some case, they often use only two colors besides black and white. Web development has now stepped into the era of simple beauty where the preferences are large and usual fonts with a few soft hues. How is it possible to explain such a trend? This approach makes sense because it focuses user attention on the most important blocks of information.
In fact, we have presented a basic list of new trends in website design, because they actually are tens and this number is too high for a single post. We will definitely continue providing you with recent style solutions in web development on our blog.
Our team will gladly assist you in creating a responsive website implementing major web design trends and effective technologies to make it as optimized as possible. Drop us a line at info@stfalcon.com and we will be more than happy to help!
