Your website should never remain static, but instead should keep moving to ensure that the style, format and design is still relevant. Website designs continue to change and evolve like with most other things, so it is important to ensure that your website doesn’t look outdated against these new design ideas. With this in mind, we’ve put together an idea of some of the website design trends to look out for this year.

Similar trends are continuing from last year, however there are some slight changes.

Images 

Over the last year, we have seen a move away from stock images and a steer towards individual images and videos instead. Many new websites now prefer to provide their own photographs and images to push forward their individual brands.

Video Content

We have seen a big increase in the use of videos in websites over the last few months and this trend is here to stay. Large videos added to the homepage of websites create a dynamic and professional look which makes it easier to capture your audience quickly. A short 1-2 minute video can explain who you are and what you do easier than visitors scrolling through your website.

Colours and Gradients

Flat colours will soon be phased out for a preference for an increase in gradients and shadows. Used tastefully to highlight a design, it is another way of adding a dynamic look to your website design.

We have also seen an increase in the use of white space in sites, providing a clear and concise structure that it easy on the eye.

Mobile Friendliness

The issue of responsive websites is not new, but over the coming year it will be more important than ever to ensure that your website is responsive. In 2017, websites who were not optimised suffered with their rankings, but soon any website that is not optimised will not really be taken too seriously. In a quick moving industry, ensuring that you are keeping up with important changes such as optimisation is a must if you are to keep credibility in your market sector.

Our Lead Developer, Rich O’Donnell had this to say

“I can’t see a huge difference between last year and this year in website trends, but more of a continuation of those that have emerged over the last 12 months.

Clients should now be more interested in mobile design than before, as clearly many more people use mobile devices now to look at sites than on desktops. This puts an additional task at the hands of developers to basically design what the clients wants for more than one device, but is now a vital aspect of website development and design”