Every website owner together with the designer want their page to be different from millions of others, but anyway there is a web design fashion and tendencies to follow.
If you are any close to world of web design, you might have noticed that the general mainstream trends now are simplicity, app style interface, flat and responsive designs. Apparently it’s not all the tendencies, otherwise every website would look nearly the same.
What will we see on the Internet in 2014? Here we picked some features that are now becoming trends in web design and most probably will last for some time.
1. Storytelling Design and Content-first
This methodology suggests that users are told a story through concise, compelling copy coupled with strong imagery as they scroll down the page. Another way to say it? MAKE. IT. FUN. Let them discover who you/your company are by letting it unfold before their eyes, so to speak. Let them start where you did and fast-track them to how you arrived at a solution. Gone are the days of “I am so great” over and over again – in every nook and cranny of your site. (At least we hope it will be after reading this.) Imagine scrolling down to the bottom of a website page, where the process unfolds like a fairy tale, or an evolution of sorts.
2. Video getting more impressive
Many websites are using video rather than text to tell their story, explain their product, or provide directions for use of a product. The great thing about videos is that they really boost visibility of a site in searches, especially if all the necessary SEO elements are in place. The bad thing with videos is that you can lose some visitors if you don’t also provide an alternate text version. Some individuals would much rather take a few seconds to skim through text (with headings included for longer blocks of text, of course) than watch a 30 second to 2 minute video.
3. Deeply-Focused Landing Pages
Software developers often purchase a domain name and launch a website as a marketing tool. This idea has since expanded to encapsulate mobile games, open source scripts, smartphone apps, really any digital product you can imagine. These landing pages are basically essential to encourage prospective customers into learning more about a product before buying.
4. Scroll and gesture-driven experiences
Scrolling has grown a lot since 2012. Partly it is because scrolling is easy enough to execute, and partly it’s because designers are thinking about mobile and tablet devices, and about how to design with the swipe in mind.
Parallax scrolling, horizontal scrolling, column-based scrolling and infinite scrolling are all things that we’ll probably see more of in 2014 and beyond. There are a few things to be wary of though,particularly around infinite scrolling.
5. Minimalist navigation
We live in an information age, and as a result we can be prone to information overload. One of the ways this has manifested in Web design is a return to a more functional, minimalist interfaces as a way to combat information overload.
Everything from a site’s layout to its color palette and typography are being stripped down to the bare essentials as part of the move toward minimalist design. Complex animations and dense graphics are being replaced by static, large image backgrounds, sans serif fonts, and contrasting color palettes. The result is a website that looks clean and functional, further allowing the content to speak for itself.