What's in this article?
Are you thinking about hiring a web design firm in 2018? Core website features, like responsive web design, social integration, WordPress functionality, and client usability, still matter. But you may also be interested in these 5 new and interesting web design trends. Each has the potential to help your business improve your bottom line.
1. Print-Ready Content
It’s 2018, who prints a website? As it turns out, a lot of people print websites. The reasons vary, from humorous stories of technophobia to totally practical usage cases. If there’s any chance a print-ready version of your website content could help your customers, you shouldn’t ignore it. Printed content has many applications and a print-out that looks great is only going to help build a relationship with your customer.
Consider some of the more practical uses of print-ready content. You may need to store PDF files on your website, or perhaps you have great long-form, evergreen content, full of information that a customer wants to take with them. You may have customers comparison shopping or bulk-shopping in your ecommerce store and they may want a clean, uncluttered printout of some of your item pages like in the example above. Perhaps your site has the instructions for how to use or assemble your product. Maybe your site has white papers, ebooks, checklists, service instructions, recipes, guitar tabs, or other content a site visitor wants to print out.
How It Helps Businesses
Optimizing your site to handle clean printouts could help you better do what you need to do. Your customers will certainly appreciate that your product instructions, white papers, checklists, and other content doesn’t have ink-hogging graphics, collisions of text blocks, or cumbersome formatting. This will build rapport and potentially earn you more sales. Best of all, it’s pretty easy to implement, with either a few lines of CSS code or a WordPress plugin.
2. Split-Page Designs
Many businesses face the challenge of having a lot of content they need to get in front of their user base. Content hierarchy can help, by ranking what’s most important. But that could leave some important content journeys buried in a drop-down menu or languishing below-the-fold. One solution is the web design trend towards split-page design.
Split-page design in effect gives you twice the screen real estate, by dividing your design into two side-by-side parts. You could feature your primary CTA, your product catalog, your client portfolio, etc. on the left. And you could put your blog, FAQs, social media links on the right side, like Engine Themes has done. This might be a good solution for those businesses with a website that serves multiple constituencies, such as corporate sites, NGOs, and charities.
How It Helps Businesses
The biggest challenge when designing a site for a client that needs to put forward a lot of clickable content CTAs or has to satisfy multiple audiences is how to organize it all. The split-page design gives designers and companies another option to try. This can help businesses get all of their content and links in front their web users without overwhelming them.
3. Responsive Logos
Mobile web design has continued to grow and grow over the last couple years. So it should be no surprise that companies are looking for ways to continue to grow their own brand awareness across multiple screen sizes. Yet not all logos work in every screen situation. One solution is responsive logo design. As the screen size gets smaller, the logo adjusts to fit the display requirements. This all happens automatically for your users as they move from viewing your device on their desktop to their smartphone. A responsive logo a small detail, but one with a big impact.
How It Helps Businesses
Kaleidico is a big fan of responsive web design. It gives our web design clients the ability to serve multiple channels, from desktop to tablet and mobile, with one simple web design, without sacrificing aesthetics or functionality. Plus, responsive design pleases Google Search, which is driving the web towards serving mobile-first functionality. If you’ve got a responsive website but don’t have a responsive logo, put a logo redesign at the top of your list for your next site refresh.
4. Graphic Animations
Motion grabs attention. By itself, that’s not a very new or interesting idea. Yet what is new and interesting is realization that designers can use a bit of motion to draw a web user’s attention to just the right place on the screen. This trend is catching on with the use of integrated animations, GIFs, and Cinemagraphs like the ones in the best-of video above.
These animations are finding their way onto landing pages, banners, CTAs and more. Integrated animations can be used to prompt a user to click, scroll, or watch. GIFs can be used to demonstrate how your app, web tool, or software works right on your landing page. We’ve mentioned before how cinemagraphs can improve conversions. This is another kind of animation, where still photographs feature minor repeated motion.
How It Helps Businesses
These kinds of animations aren’t just showy and trendy. They actually solve a problem, in that they get the user to stop and take note. Use them sparingly — we don’t want to turn your business website into a mid-2000s Myspace GIF storm — and you can draw your website visitor’s attention to the most important button or content block on the screen.
5. Minimalist Design
Minimalism isn’t new, but it is getting even more minimal. A good example is the Detroit furniture company Floyd — lots of white space, simple menus, streamlined content. Some experts say that minimalist web design is evolving. Style boundaries are becoming blurry, meaning that features such as oversized typography and imagery, simple navigation systems, interactive elements, flat design, and more are all coming together.
How It Helps Businesses
The benefit to businesses of a minimalist design is that there’s nothing extra that could distract your users from your content and user journey. Visual hierarchy is key in these kinds of designs, meaning a lot of thought goes into the background structure before any copywriting or visual assets go on the page. This can help focus users towards clicking on your all-important CTAs.
Conclusion
A business website exists to help you grow your business. Therefore, it’s important to consider any new trend that might help you do that. There’s no need to jump on the bandwagon for every new trend under the sun, but some trends may be just right for your business needs.