Having a website that you can consider as a great one is always your first digital expression. It should embody everything you want your customers to be familiar with and to keep in mind about your enterprise. This trend is nothing new to marketers or enterprise owners who have been in the field for quite some time. Those flourishing enterprises are always trying to progress the quality of their websites to meet the demands of their customers. Generally, most people tend to seek out something when visiting your website. For this fact, you want to make sure that they are finding it instantly and with less effort. Your enterprise may have been excellent in terms of the enterprise model and customer service, but with a poor functioning website, you will eventually miss an amount of purchases and this will ultimately create a bad impression.
Standards and expectations are high and you must at least be a level to it or by far, exceed it since most likely your competitors also have incredible websites. For you to stay on the high ground, you’ve got to have a website that is accessible enough with easy browsing of your products and services. Thus, allowing easy purchases and interactions with your enterprise. If there’s one true thing about design, it’s the fact that it is not constant and it changes from time to time. To accommodate the form and function the design must be adjusted that is why the design is dynamic. Due to its evolving nature, keeping up with the newest design trends is a challenge nowadays. The most significant design trends have the customer experience as its central focus. The goals of this year’s rising design trends are to streamline and perfect that customer experience. This can be achieved by creating content that is responsive, easy to access and most of all enhances customer satisfaction.
There are always round the corner predictions at the end of the year for the trends whole year round. Yet, it proves to be difficult to determine which ones are simply beneficial for your website or not. For this reason, we put together the list of website trends we see booming in 2016. Among those who also weigh in are our designers and developers. Below are the 6 sure fire website trends for you.
Card Layouts
Developed by Pinterest, cards are present everywhere on the web because they present information in bite-sized chunks for the purposes of scanning. Each is a one and unified concept. They are “content containers” and their rectangular shape appears to be easier for them to re-arrange for different device breakpoints.
There are a lot more websites using card-based design. A beneficial factor of this type of design is that the card design is ideal for customers with mobile devices with different screen sizes and these cards can be easily adjusted depending on each screen size.
As discussed above, card-based design goes along with the theme of simplicity and minimalism. Cards create an easy way to promote customer action through short and simple bursts of information that is easily digested. This is usually one click through a landing page or an in-depth information on a particular topic.
Richer animations
The point of the design is to look good and what looks better than cool animations? In addition, the web has never been better than it has today, and that’s a trend nowadays. Animations boost interactivity, enhance storytelling and create engagement. Things such as:
• Loading bars
• Spinners
• Parallax scrolling
• Mouse hovers’ triggered animations
These make a website more alive and interactive experience than just a simple portal where individual, service, product and information of a certain enterprise can be found. For you to make most of the animations in 2016, don’t go overboard. While others are seeing the swift end of minimalism, this isn’t the space to do excess. Too much movement will confuse, distract or scatter focus and will irritate customers.
As much as needed, keep animations thematically consistent, modest and simple. “Thematically” means from a perspective of storytelling. Your site should appear like a well-told narrative revealing guiding detail for the customers down the path of your choosing. Use animations only when needed to indicate action or to illustrate crucial points.
HD Hero Images
Images grab attentions quickly especially visitors and it can communicate almost instantly especially if it has a high quality. In fact, 90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual and processed 60,000x faster compared to a text. Despite their large size, data compression made it possible to build websites that load these high-res quickly.
HD hero images are one of the fastest ways to get the customer’s attention since vision is the strongest human sense. One infographic is equivalent to a thousand words. Also, due to the advances of bandwidth and data compression, customers won’t have trouble from slow load times. A hero image above the scroll is one common layout you’ll find. This is followed by either zig-zagging sections or cards based order.
Setting the tone as well as guiding your customers’ eyes to important information is another way of using hero images. Why is this? Generally, when the picture is looking at something, the viewer is enticed to look in the same direction. In addition, studies of eye-tracking have shown that when people are looking someone in a picture, they look at the face first. In this regard, headshots of customer service reps boost page conversion rates by 20%. Hero images also convey emotions which have a great impact on a customer’s decision to convert. Most of the times, people visualize themselves using your product or service rather than just hearing about unclear features and benefits.
Related: 6 Steps to Create Successful Infographic and Double Your Webpage Traffic
Personalization
Web design focusing on personalized customer experience may become a norm. Rather than having the same experience when visiting a certain website, it is designed specifically for a particular customer. That is the personalized customer experience design which allows content and experience just for you.
Janrain &Harris Interactive have shown in their study that over 70% online customers get irritated when presented with promotional content that is out of their interests. Typically, the best offer of a personalized customer experience is those that able to adapt to the customer’s interests and demands without the customer having to do that much.
Location and referral source (e.g. mobile vs. Desktop) can be the things to base your personalization content of your site to your customers. Another is that you can use their previous interactions with your site or of the stored information that you know about them. Personalized sites will surely flourish this 2016, but make sure to be in the fine line between helpful and stalker-ish. Recommending helpful content and analyzing your visitor’s information is great. Also, do not use their full name and location when greeting the returning visitors to your site. Focus on helping your customers and make their lives stress-free.
Responsive Design
A design that responds to the customer’s behavior and environment based on orientation, platform and screen size is the approach called Responsive Web design. The practice is composed of an intelligent use of CSS media queries, images and a mix of flexible grids and layouts. The website should adjust automatically when the customer switches from their laptop to iPad. This is to accommodate for scripting abilities, image size, and resolution. In short, the website should have the technology to respond to the customer’s choice. To avoid confusion, here are the things to keep in mind.
• Refrain from using JavaScript and CSS image loading the display:none tag. This adds unnecessary weight to a page and still downloads.
• A responsive image defined by using a percentage is highly recommended.
• Social sharing impacts negatively and reduce performance so pay particular attention to third-party scripts.
• Any JavaScript and as many of the JavaScript components used on a desktop site that use conditional loading will not be used on smaller devices.
• Use Server Side RESS – Responsive
• Effectively measure and optimize each site then apply performance testing into the process.
For now, let’s say that responsive design is stable, as it represents a simple and cheap way for enterprises for them to have a fully-functional mobile-friendly site. If not carried out properly, this web design may come with an issue, the most important being, the performance.
Site Security
It may have reached your eyes or ears about SSL and asked yourself “what is SSL and why is it so important?” Basically, SSL stands for secure sockets layer. Between the customer’s computer and the server, its purpose is to create a secure connection. No third parties can gain access along the way because an SSL certificate encrypts the information. This means that it is delivered to the intended recipient. Moreover, it improves customer confidence in your site and provides a slight SEO boost from Google. Plus, this SSL is necessary for improving the customer trust in your company and accepting payments online.
Providing security over the internet is the purpose of the SSL protocol. Between the website and web server or database, it is a good idea to use a security certificate. This is because when passing personal information, attackers could sniff for this information if the connection is not secure. They will be able to capture and use this information to gain access to customer accounts and personal data.
A great site to check your website SSL configuration: https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest
Consider adding an Extended Validation Certificate which provides the company name in the browser URL if you are interested in even more trust and security.
