Web design is like a fine wine, complex and dynamic. It combines a multitude of skills and knowledge that have an influence on how well a site will be perceived by any given audience. Web design trends change greatly from year to year, constantly raising the digital design bar.
Each year we see a new set of styles and standards that become attractive for business and brands to incorporate into their projects. From emerging technologies and algorithm updates to new color schemes and font designs, how do perceptive brands confront these changes? They harness the power of their website, constantly refreshing it to meet the needs of their audience. They plan ahead and are open about taking new approaches to connecting, interacting, and engaging with customers online.
It takes users a mere 0.05 seconds to decide whether or not they like your site and bounce away. You don’t have long to hook them, so any small effort you can make from a design standpoint to grab their attention and make your site stand out is worth it. In today’s competitive marketplace, it is not just enough to have a great-looking website, it must also convert.
Web design trends are here to drive innovative conversion by utilizing accessible technology to create websites that are both visually appealing and user-friendly. In 2019 we will see aesthetics and technology come together like never before to make this happen. Improved user interaction and visitor experience will be a recurring theme that shapes the industry.
Fact Check
So, why do we care so much about the web design forecast for 2019? Well, we care because it is part of our job. But when it comes to expressing the importance of quality and innovation in web design, here are a few reasons why you should care too.
- 48% of visitors consider a website’s design to be the most telling factor about the credibility of a business.
- 94% of visitors bounce from a website and stop trusting it because of degraded design and poor usability.
- 75% of users make judgments about a company’s credibility based on the design of their website.
- There is a $100 return for every $1 that companies invest in website user
experience. - 50% of potential sales are lost because users can’t find information on a website.
Need I say more?
2019 Web Design Trends You Need to Know
A new year means a fresh set of web design trends to consider in 2019. Staying on top of trends and using them in your own web designs can help keep a website relevant. Implementing the latest styles and techniques in web design allows brands to remain competitive and experience considerable benefits in terms of digital marketing and SEO.
Prominent Visuals
- Brutalism: Bold blocks of text and/or color.
- Vibrant Color Scheme: When used correctly, bright colors enhance all the right details and harness the audience’s reactions without feeling overwhelming.
- Bold Typography: Thick, clear, and obvious lettering.
- Interactive Backgrounds: Whether it’s through branded video content or animation, dynamic tools can be integrated to work seamlessly in the background for scrolling or used as the focal point of the homepage to deliver a very powerful branding opportunity.
- Custom Illustrations/Images: Avoid the everyday stock photos and come up with something unique to the brand/site purpose.
- Non-Traditional Grid Layout: Grids keep elements aligned and displayed in a clean and neat way. Updates to this conventional style can made using broken/irregular grid layouts or shadows to create depth.
The award-winning Hotel at Midtown website demonstrates progressive design through vivid colors, pronounced typeface, and an irregular arrangement of content that is enough to draw the eye of a visitor without overwhelming.
Responsive Design
- Mobile-Friendly: Considers the reasons why a potential customer would reach for their mobile device – to know, go, do, or buy. Key elements, including a
clean homepage design, simple navigation, seamless contact forms, and usability, will enhance user experience and reduce bounce rates. - Card Layout: Cards are fast becoming the best design patterns for aggregated content, images, videos, social across all platforms, screen sizes and mobile
devices in responsive web design. Each card/the constituent part of the page contains information, such as a page or section title, an image, icon, or succinct group of text. - Thumb-Friendly Navigation: How users hold their mobile phones and how
movements, particularly those of the thumb, should be processed in the web design process. - Hamburger Menu: Three parallel horizontal lines which are used as a
navigation/menu button at the top of desktop and bottom of mobile-friendlysites.
The recently added FieldHouse Jones Offers page was built with responsive design at top of mind, as is apparent in the layout and menu of the mobile view above.
Micro-Interactions
- Reactive Event Response: An automated reaction that triggers as a result of specific user activity. This can be anything from hover and scrolling animations, rendering lists, swipe selection, search expansions, or action feedback sounds.
- Expanding Content Accordion: A common design structure used to organize and hide content, so as not to overwhelm the user. A trigger is set up to give users the ability to expand or contract the content accordion.
- Notifications: When users receive notifications, you show them that there is something important to check. Micro-animation enables a user to create an
association with your product.
How Can You Get a Modern Web Design for Your Website?
Today, an increasing number of users feel that a website’s design determines whether to trust your business or not. Therefore, the design is not only an indicator of your company’s attractiveness and the expression of your attitude to potential buyers but also the way to differentiate your company from many similar ones so that customers remember you.
Ask yourself a few questions about your current site.
Does it load fast on both desktop and mobile devices? Is it user-friendly and easy to navigate? Is the design too distracting?
If your site is slow, too cluttered, or too distracting to make anyone want to
bother with it, you need an upgrade.
Ready to think about a website redesign for 2019? The new year can be a great time to kickstart a new approach, and updating your website can provide a range
of benefits. Contact Blue Magnet’s award-winning design team to discuss building a fresh website that meets and exceeds your digital marketing needs!
