31 May Web Design Trends of 2014
Web design trends are consistently moving, with 2014 almost half way done key emerging trends simplicity, cleanliness, and focus on smaller screen size.
The battle for the small screen is really prominent now as most people are accessing content on their phones and tablets with an increasing amount of people opting for smartphones with high end HD resolution available from most manufacturers.
Key Design trends:
- Flat UI (User Interface) – This design technique is going to be with us for a while considering Windows have used this for Wndows 7 and 8.1, Apple have integrated this trend for their latest iOS7 design scheme in their operating system.
- Mobile First – Smartphone and tablet usage has skyrocketed in recent years, and is overtaking desktop traffic for many websites, forcing designers to rethink the user experience for smaller screens, design with the mobile screen in mind.
- Less Text – The web seems to becoming a lot less text-heavy, and some websites have almost no visible text, instead relying on images and icons to convey information to the user.
- Video / moving backgrounds – This is a growing trend with companies or services which are graphical, it makes for dynamic backgrounds and is eye catching.
- Typography – Web fonts are on the rise, designers are creating their own fonts unique to clients with responsive typography this makes any website standout when well executed.
- Tiles/Cards – This is a design theme that is not going away anytime soon popularised by Windows and Google Now this theme is a great medium for communicating quick stories giving the user precies content.
- Imagery – All websites need professional photography, massive pictures on landing pages and background images, as opposed to patterns for texture this is a trend for the visual generation and they certainly look great on the now common retina displays.
Web users have a dwindling attention span, your website might be the 3rd or 4th in a search result therefore it is paramount that you capture their attention within 10sec of them landing on your website otherwise they moving on to your competitor.
Having a compelling website considering all the current trends will certainly keep visitors longer, longer visits equate to possible leads, leads turn to sales.
So ask yourself if your websites is keeping up with the trends, will your landing page make a visitor stay longer than 10sec?