Web design just ain’t what it used to be. Websites need to evolve and meet modern consumer needs in order to thrive.
Clear Purpose: A strong value proposition clearly articulates what sets your business apart. It’s important to incorporate this into the design and content of your website.
Well-Written and Edited Content: Error-free content reflects professionalism and builds trust. Use of subheadings and bullet points makes your content easy to scan for key messages.
1. Parallax Scrolling
Adding a subtle movement to the web page is a great way to attract attention and create an immersive browsing experience. Parallax scrolling, in particular, can be used to tell a story or highlight key elements of a product.
However, it’s important to use this feature sparingly. If it’s overused, it can cause a site to load slowly and disrupt the user experience.
Additionally, it can be difficult to convey information using parallax designs because of the delay between click and display. It’s best to use this effect for aesthetic purposes or when it can help tell a story, such as highlighting an organization’s impact on a local community.
The website for a wearable device that helps you track your fitness and wellness is an excellent example of how parallax can be used to guide visitors into the site or through a story. The oversized text encourages users to keep scrolling and the parallax effects allow them to learn more about the company’s products and services.
An award-winning creative agency’s website uses a hero image that resembles a drawing being sketched and subtle effects to draw the eye to their services and past work as you scroll down the page.
2. Purposeful White Space
White space, also known as negative space, is the empty area between design elements. It’s a popular design strategy in minimalist designs and helps avoid content clutter. White space is essential for drawing your visitors’ eyes to the important aspects of your website. This includes your CTA buttons and lead generation forms. Using strategic white space can increase conversions by making it clear where your visitors should focus their attention. For expert guidance on optimizing white space in your website design, consider partnering with Webdesign Genk for a professional team that can tailor solutions to enhance user experience and elevate your online presence.
Effective use of white space can improve a website’s legibility, create visual hierarchy and offer a more comfortable reading pace. It also allows designers to identify what’s important in a page and help users navigate through the content easily.
Incorporating white space between your graphical elements makes your design look more polished and refined. This is especially true for websites that rely on text-heavy pages or a lot of images. It can also reduce the cluttered look of your website and make it feel more professional.
There are two types of white space in web design: micro white space and macro white space. Micro white space is the small spaces between individual graphical elements in a design, like text or image frames. Macro white space refers to larger spaces within a design layout, like the gap between different sections on a page or the gaps between images in a photo gallery. Macro white space is often more noticeable than micro white space and can help your design stand out.
3. Interactive Content
When it comes to creating engaging content for your website, interactive elements are a must. Adding images and video is more appealing to the eye than blocks of text, and can quickly captivate and keep visitors on your page. Videos and images also work as great tools to show rather than tell consumers why they need your product or service.
Adding interactive content to your website gives you an edge over competitors who do not. It is an opportunity to break the mold of traditional long-form guides, blogs, or static infographics and provides a unique user experience that will increase engagement, and ultimately, leads.
Interactive content not only makes your information more interesting to consume, but it can also help you collect data on consumer behavior and preferences. This feedback can be in the form of likes, shares, comments, or web analytics. It can also be as simple as a prompt to leave a quick service rating or a survey to collect customer data.
Whether it’s an interactive quiz, a calculator, or an immersive experience, interactivity allows brands to gather data in a way that feels more organic and less intrusive than just asking for feedback via a standard comment box. This approach is proven to improve lead generation, brand awareness, and ultimately, fosters loyalty amongst customers.
4. Clean Backend Coding
Clean code refers to a set of tools, practices, and conventions that ensure software is well-organized, understandable, and easy to maintain. It’s important to prioritize this because it allows developers to work faster and reduces the risk of errors. This is especially true when dealing with large and complex codebases that may require more time to debug and fix.
One of the most common clean coding techniques is proper documentation. This is critical not only for the developer who wrote the code but also for future developers who may need to read and modify it. It also makes it easier to find issues that need fixing, such as bugs or performance bottlenecks.
A clean backend is essential for a website’s functionality. Having highly-skilled designers who know how to write clean code will help your website function flawlessly and load quickly for visitors. This can improve SEO-based ranking and ultimately lead to more conversions for your business.
5. Responsive Design
With an increasing percentage of users accessing websites on mobile devices, it’s no longer enough to have a website that only looks good on desktop screens. With users often switching between devices to complete a task, responsive web design provides an optimal experience for every user by automatically adapting content to fit each device’s screen size and resolution.
It’s also an important factor in SEO, as Google prioritizes responsive sites. In addition, studies have shown that users are more likely to stay on a site with excellent usability, meaning that responsive websites are also more likely to convert visitors into subscribers, leads or paying customers.
Responsive web design requires a combination of HTML and CSS. HTML provides the structure for a web page, while CSS defines its appearance and behavior. The key to responsive design is using CSS to specify how elements should respond to different screen sizes and orientations. For example, older designs used absolute values for width, but responsive websites use fluid layouts that rely on percentage-based values, such as the size of the screen. Other CSS techniques such as flexbox layouts can also expand items to fill free space or shrink them to prevent item overflow.
6. Dark Mode
Dark Mode is a trending design feature that allows users to choose a darker color palette. This can be particularly appealing to those who have visual impairments and are sensitive to light, as well as those who want to conserve battery life on their mobile devices. It’s also aesthetically pleasing and helps to reduce eye strain.
The Moody Doula is a professional childbirth educator, and her website uses dark mode to complement the overall mood of her brand. The calming color palette and simple, minimalist layout make the site easy to navigate and read in dark mode.
In addition to offering a more visually appealing user experience, dark mode can help businesses save on energy costs. OLED and AMOLED screens consume less power when displaying dark colors, making them more environmentally friendly than traditional LCD screens. For businesses with multiple platforms, enabling a dark mode option can also be a great way to increase visibility and boost engagement across all channels.
While integrating Dark Mode presents an additional challenge for developers, it can improve user experience by providing a customizable browsing experience that matches users’ preferences and environmental conditions. To ensure the best results, be sure to test your designs in both light and dark mode, especially for images and floating elements.
7. Social Media Integration
Social Media Integration is not just another buzzword; it has become a vital component of every successful digital marketing strategy. By integrating social media into a website, brands can engage their audience and build a following with more ease than traditional methods.
This can be done in many ways, from adding social sharing buttons to a page to embedding live social feeds or user-generated content galleries. Websites can also include social login options to simplify the sign-in process and offer personalized recommendations based on a visitor’s social profile.
Social media integration into a website is also an excellent way to provide customers with more information about the company and their products or services. It can also help create a more personal connection with the brand by allowing them to communicate directly through their social channels.
Moreover, incorporating social media integration into a website allows brands to promote their latest promotions and campaigns in an effective manner. For example, GoPro integrates their social media feed into their product pages to highlight customer-generated content and promote the products. This helps in increasing brand visibility and customer loyalty. In addition, it can be used to enhance the omnichannel experience by giving visitors the option to chat with customer support staff through their preferred channel.
