 Technology doesn’t sit still. Chips get faster. Hackers get more creative, so software makers try and keep ahead. At the same time, these tech trends spawn their own design trends. Not long ago, whenever a new Photoshop filter came out, you’d see it in every single ad and image until you were quickly sick of it. Ditto for video effects like “the Matrix slow-mo” or the more recent “narrow focus to make big things like cars and cities look tiny.”
These are trends. Meaning, they come and go. Same thing happens when you focus on the realm of website design. New technology spawns new trends. Long ago, there was a big clamor about “Web 2.0”: it was a then-revolutionary idea that someone viewing a web page could actually alter that web page. Today, that’s, um, “Facebook.” So the tech trends, in website design, continue. There were “frames”; remember those? It was revolutionary at the time: within the same website page, you could, say, scroll through content in just the right column. Today, that’s largely, um annoying. Although it does persist in what are hopefully apt applications. More recent tech trends include animation that any processor (think “mobile phone”) can easily handle. This began as the “carousel” atop a home page, wherein, say, four or five key images and headlines would appear, sequentially switching to the next. More processing power (specifically, GPU or graphics processing unit) translates to more video power; that’s why you’ve recently seen more and more websites that actually include a loop of video running behind text on their home screen. It’s really easy to see the boundaries of this type of technology, as well as the limits they place on designers. If you come to a website with video playing as its “key art” imagery atop the page, simply count off the seconds to yourself until it repeats. That’s the “magic number” for how much video can be included. And guess what? If that @%$% video took forever to load, then that site made a mistake. They over-assumed for your device, your operating system, your browser. Here’s one more tech innovation which you’ve probably seen emerging as a website design trend: That “layered look” as you scroll down a screen. The text scrolls quickly, while the images behind it scroll a little slower, giving it a “Disney multiplane animation” effect to it. Designers have a say, too Not all website design trends are technology-based. There are cultural phenomena at work, too. Any hot franchise or look will affect designers. Back when Ken Burns’ breakout Civil War miniseries aired on PBS, it seemed you couldn’t find an ad that wasn’t presented as a sepia photo, with some announcer speaking, memoir-like, over a rustic piano score. Fast-forward to when Apple introduced the iMac. Remember that translucent blue plastic beach ball? Every product, from kitchen knives to vacuum cleaners, soon sported transparent blue plastic, and dopey names like the iKnife or iVacuum. (We just made those up, but wouldn’t be surprised if they really happened.) More recently, take a cultural phenomenon like Mad Men. It alone helped to bring back the look of the “Swinging Sixties,” in everything from iconography to fonts to color palettes. All of which leads to the million-dollar question: Which website design trends are most profitable for your business? Asking in reverse If you’ve read enough of these Copel Communications articles, you’ll know that we’re downright religious about taking a customer-back approach to marketing. Always start with the target customer: What they want. What problems they need to solve. Then back your solution into the answers to those questions. Website design is no different! You don’t want to ask, for example, “Should we use that huge-scrolling-page/no-links-whatsoever approach, or go ‘old-school,’ with a nav bar and discrete website pages?” That question will get you nowhere—or, worse, to the wrong place diametrically—because it’s the wrong question. You want to understand what your prospects want from your site and design for them. Take the choice noted above. Are your prospects more likely to visit your site from a desktop computer or a tiny little phone? A traditional layout suits the former, whereas the “big scroll” may better accommodate the latter. Here’s a good litmus test: Pretend you’re a prospect of your business, and then “visit” your proposed site yourself. How quickly can you get to the information you need to find? How easy is it to see and to digest? How clear and compelling is the call-to-action? Using this measuring stick, you’ll be able to quickly discard the trendier options. And we mean “trendier” in its most disparaging sense: stuff that was created just to stroke some designer’s ego, with zero consideration paid to the person actually consuming the content. Don’t opt for low-contrast text-on-background that’s pretty but hard to read. Don’t employ floating graphic bars or blobs that don’t help the viewer separate sections by color or intuitively drill down into content. Do cater to your visitor’s need to get a quick lay of the land, and drill down to what they need. It may sound old-school, because it is, but something as simple as an outline—as in big headline, medium-sized subhead, and then smaller bullet-point text—goes a lot further than some flashy mishmash of fonts, graphics, and countdown animations. We can’t tell you how many times we’ve clicked away from a website in frustration over junk like that which finally sent us packing. Your prospects will do the same thing. Get help We know about these trends, and which ones work and which ones don’t, because we toil in this realm daily on our clients’ behalf. Join them, won’t you? Contact us today to help your website grab you as much business as possible.
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