Web design trends basically tell you the path the industry is headed. For this year’s roundup, Proweaver gives you all our latest additions to the toolbox of trends that enhance user experiences and not just create generic websites and applications that you can’t even tell apart from each other.
Custom web design
has come a very long way. For 2019, micro-interactions, voice interfaces, bigger typography, and exceptional video content are spearheading the trends that are guaranteed to make waves this year and, perhaps, even shape the industry in the years to come.
Web Design Goals
When visitors land on your site, are they easily able to determine what your company provides? Are users able to navigate each section of your website effortlessly? Are you happy with your bounce rate? The popular trends for 2019 look to address these issues and more. Proweaver aims to partner with you to design and optimize your website so that you may answer “yes” to all these questions.
It’s a new year so, naturally, we’ve gone a step further from our 2018 tips and included some actionable advice on how to improve your web design practices.
Design Trends for 2019
The fast-paced and ever-changing digital landscape guarantees that your website simply can’t succeed on quality design or content alone. You will need to work beyond these limited aspects and create designs that boost user experience, improve functionality, and augment your content.
Before we go into the design tips you absolutely need to implement this 2019, let’s again go over your single, most important objective in website design: your design has to be able to communicate in the clearest possible way, to your target market, what your company does and why it does it.
So how do you go about doing this and improving your custom web design practices?
Here are twelve of the most awesome website design tips you will ever read this 2019:
-
Having a plan is a must
The first step to any process, but especially website design, is to not just proceed without a plan. You need to have a blueprint of how things should go so that your website can effectively meet the needs and goals of your target audience.
What’s your next step for your company and what role does your website play in it? Remember that for as long as your business is around and developing, there’s never going to be a “final” step, only the “next” one. Do your research and find out how visitors in the past were converted into customers. This data is basically everything you need to map out your new web design strategy. -
Shares on social media
You may have the best, most informative content, but if you’re not giving your audiences the option to share them, you won’t be able to gain their full benefits. Social share buttons should be part of your current design as they give you the opportunity to boost social media traffic generated from your regular readers and followers. Sharing buttons, which contain the icons of various social media channels, encourage people to share your post.
You can put your social sharing buttons at the top or bottom of your posts. -
Clean up your website
There may be certain elements in your site that do not align with your company’s message. Too lengthy content, stocky web images, and bad animation are just some factors worth mentioning. Plus, make sure to steer clear of ambiguous terminology because readers aren’t going to like that. The same goes for words that thousands of other companies are already using. These words won’t, in any way, make your content more appealing.
Keep in mind that, on average, the general attention span of your audience is less than ten seconds, which means you need to create a first impression that successfully sends the message across. Short and precise content and sections, plus applicable photos with concise headers, are a great combination.
-
Call-to-action buttons
After landing on your site, do you make it clear to your visitors where to go next? Part of what makes a modern website easy to navigate is a call-to-action button.
You don’t want users asking themselves “and then what?” after landing on a page or section of your website. It’s important to carefully guide them towards the next step, whether it’s to make a purchase, fill out a form, download an application, or answer a survey.2019 calls for more than just ordinary call-to-action buttons. You’ll want to go the next step and add buttons that offer educational materials and other useful information. Review your website’s pages; are you finding that most of your call-to-actions are for setting appointments, bookings, consultations, and the like? If so, then it’s high time for some changes.
-
Applicable photos and images
The pictures displayed on your website should align with the message you wish to send to your target audience. Choosing the right photos typically isn’t something you should be worried about as the internet offers more than enough options for everyone. Some of them you don’t even need to pay for, but many still end up picking really stocky photos. You’ll want photos of real people who actually work in your company and real events that have actually taken place.
Here’s a tip for picking images: choose an image that genuinely aligns with your company message and evokes trust in your business. This will bring more realism to your brand and make sure that the images being used complement the content.
-
Easy navigation
Navigation is a key part of any web design process. This gives your audiences a map of the core pages on your site they should visit. When your site’s navigation interface is confusing or disorganized, nobody’s going to want to explore it. Take note that audiences want to be able to find what they’re looking for on your site easily. If you don’t help them accomplish that, expect them to move on without a second thought.
-
A longer homepage works
Don’t think twice about designing a longer homepage if its purpose is to improve user experience. There’s nothing wrong with adding a few more sections that direct audiences to the core pages on your site. Examples of these key sections to add in the homepage are: About Us, Resources, Testimonials, Services, and more. Of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to vital homepage elements. You’re more than welcome to expand your list as you please for as long as it adds quality to your homepage.
-
White Space
This is a critical element in web design that breaks up the page and improves readability. Also called the “negative space”, these are areas surrounding page elements that are devoid of content and visual items. While we understand your wariness of adding extra space, it helps prioritize content and increases readability. Furthermore, it plays a crucial part in the design process and positioning of the webpage elements.
For pages that lack negative space, make sure to review and, if necessary, strip them of content that doesn’t align with the purpose of the page.
-
Mobile-Adaptability
These days, it’s important to optimize your site for other devices, particularly mobile phones. Majority of internet users may access your site from their smartphone, and the last thing you want is to direct them to an app or mobile version of your website. This inconvenience could be more than enough to lead them to a competitor website.
Your site has to be perfectly suited to various interfaces, allowing it to provide users a similar experience regardless of what device they choose to view your website from. Your goal should always be to create a seamless mobile experience for your target audiences.
-
Get Discovered
You probably have a really great website, but that’s not really going to matter if your audiences can’t find it. To develop a strong online presence, you need to build a website that can get easily discovered.
SEO is the key. It’s important to develop a strategy that puts into consideration the keywords audiences would typically enter into search engines when looking for the services your company offers. To ensure the effectiveness of this strategy, you need to create blogs, videos, articles, and other content that is relevant to the needs of your target market.Work with specialists at Proweaver to prevent yourself from getting sidetracked by endless content possibilities your website could rank for. Attracting too much traffic isn’t ideal, especially if most of it isn’t going to result in conversions.
-
Continue to test
There are plenty of tools that allow you to gather all sorts of crucial data, such as most visited pages, most clicked buttons, the length at which users explore your site, and much more. These pieces of information reveal if the specific pages of your site are indeed performing the way you intended them to.
You’re going to encounter this problem quite often with older landing pages. While these pages could still be performing well, they may contain outdated information that can be updated. Some elements of the page could maybe use some tweaking as well. Some minor design changes, such as improving the copy or changing the button colors, could make a huge difference in terms of the page’s level of performance.
Prior to making changes, however, you’ll want to take advantage of tools that help you see what users are doing. This will give you an idea of which elements of your website’s specific pages should be changed and improved for user experience. Through constant testing, you’re able to acquire data regarding the particular ways users interact with pages. -
Be unique with your offerings
There are a number of ways to convert our audiences into customers. You can present demos, offers, and other items that will appeal to them. However, don’t think it will be easy with the tons of resources available on the internet. In order to break through the noise and succeed in converting your visitors, you mustn’t only pay attention to what’s available but also to what’s not. Whatever’s not being offered out there is something that you can use to your advantage. Being unique with your offers keeps you a step ahead of the competition.
Today’s world is more complex than it has ever been. Designing products and services in this modern landscape now requires great knowledge, experience, and skill in a combination of interfaces for chatting, talking, and touching, connected devices and applications, multiple touch points, artificial intelligence, and machine learning, and so much more.
How do you break free from all the noise and stand out in today’s industry? The common message that unites all 2019 custom web design trends, and even the past years’ trends, is to put your customers’ diverse needs at the very heart of your design.
What web design trends do you think will make a splash in 2019? Please share them on the comment section below.