Keeping up with the latest website trends is one of the best ways of engaging your visitors and getting them to return to your site. The following design aspects are predicted to be among the most popular throughout 2016; if you are thinking of revamping your site, give it the ‘wow’ factor by including some of the following simple web design tricks…
Be Bold
Traditionally, website designers have usually gone with black text, but this is something you can expect to see changing in the coming year, especially for non-corporate websites. Boris Dzhingarov predicts 2016 will be the year of bigger, bolder or colourful fonts, which are more attractive to the reader’s eye and guaranteed to gain and hold their attention.
Engaging Content
In order to compete with other websites, it is essential that the content is engaging; one way of doing this is to introduce more imagery in the form of animation and retina-ready pictures. New technologies have made it possible for the average website owner or designer to create exciting visuals such as cinemagraphs and animations, so consider using these if you truly want to wow your audience.
Storytelling
Another trend that you can expect to see a lot of in 2016 is storytelling. Storytelling has become an increasingly popular means of engaging visitors, and it will help to keep them on your website longer, helping to reduce your bounce rate and improving your chances of making a conversion.
The best approach to this is to ensure that you create an interactive story that will draw your visitors in, and make sure to incorporate different means of engaging your visitors such as audio and video.
Responsive Design
Responsive web design is one trend that cannot afford to be ignored. There are now record numbers of people using mobiles and tablets to access the internet and this means that your website needs to be prepared for these visitors.
If you want to meet the demands of the modern day audience, who expect fast loading, accessible webpages while they are on the go, then a responsive website needs to be part of your digital business plan for 2016.
Clean Navigation
Website designers need to find ways of catering for the increasing amount of mobile visitors and this means implementing a cleaner navigation system. For this reason, a side menu, or a hamburger menu as it is sometimes known, is expected to become a popular option in the coming year.