07 Mar 5 Nashville Web Design Trends for 2016
Today I wanted to talk about an article by Jessie-Lee Nichols on current trends in website design and give a Nashville web design spin on it. She makes a lot of great points and a few that I don’t totally agree with.
No Responsive Website? –
This has been a mantra of mine for almost two years. We knew several months in advance that Google was going to be levying a sudo-penalty on non mobile friendly websites by giving additional points to acceptable examples that view well on mobile devices. If you haven’t made the step yet, it’s time. Give us a call and we can help out with options. It doesn’t pay to work against Google on this one, as we have seen older websites take a 50 percent hit against competitors with responsive websites. Get on the same playing field and then we can work on optimization and marketing for the site to surpass other websites.
While I do agree that most websites produced in the past two years do look very similar, I’m not sure it’s a good thing. Yes, content is king and the website design has to take a back seat to amazing content. But, we work very hard here at Darkstar Design to produce websites that stand out from your competition and put your brand forward in the best light possible.
Stepping back and letting a website design be so homogeneous that it fades into the background of its competition is a mistake, and even though it is true that User Interface patterns are being pared down to where we only use the most effective those patterns can be harnessed in beautiful ways.
Hamburger Menus
The mobile hamburger menu is becoming very commonplace on phones, and is starting to become ubiquitous. Using it on desktop resolutions, however, seems right now to a bit of lazy hack. There are no substitutes for well defined navigation schemes and usable silos of pages within a website design. As a usability item, it seems more like a touchscreen experience than a typical desktop one.
(The screenshot on the left has a typical Hamburger)
THERE IS NO FOLD ON A WEBSITE
This is one of those that really get us agitated. Above the fold is a tactic to sell newspapers and doesn’t translate to web development.
Facebook and the other social media websites are training all of our users to scroll. And when we have the chance to have a longer home page, we are able to create better, more scripted experiences for users. We can step them through the defined marketing process for that client and get much better results.
Nashville Web Design for 2016 – Subtle Changes on the Past Two Years
After two years of extreme change, I think we are starting to settle down and can get into a groove for a bit. Flat design is continuing to be king, due to the heavy reliance on responsive website design.
Be sure to read the entire article here:
http://www.business2community.com/online-marketing/5-web-design-trends-watch-2016-01465369