With most small businesses now spending around £50,000 a year on digital marketing alone, you need to find ways to stay ahead of competitors cost effectively. By staying on top of the web design trends of 2019, you can ensure that you’re able to stay competitive. Trends change quickly but a few of these are becoming new standards for online design.
Here are four trends to watch out for this year.
1. Better, Faster, Stronger
One of the major web design trends we’re going to see over the next year is the increased speed of data transfer. As we develop better technologies, we’re constantly pushing them to the limit. We expect all of our data to move quickly and efficiently, no matter how bad our connection is.
When someone arrives at your website, they expect you to give them a site that loads immediately. If you don’t give them a usable site within the first few seconds, they’re going to browse to somewhere else. Every millisecond counts!
With the latest updates to Google’s search engine algorithm, websites are being ranked for how fast they load. If your site doesn’t load fast enough, it means that you’re going to be lower in the ranking than you should be.
Web design needs to be better looking and more efficient if you want to ensure that you get the kind of traffic that you’re looking for. Bloated code and slow pages are no longer acceptable. People are working from their phones and expecting more from the sites they visit and the applications they use than ever before.
Take compression seriously to ensure that you send your users quality content that’s optimised for their devices.
2. Flatter Than Ever
Clean and simple design is in. Too much animation, drop shadows, and 3D elements are out. Sites that have too many images can be slow on mobile devices, so everyone is starting to simplify.
Cleaner and more minimalist designs are taking over. They load quickly, keep a focus on the elements that matter, and ensure that sites stay organised clearly, whether they’re loaded on mobile devices or desktops. This flat design plays well in a world where you want to have fast loading sites that give everyone what they want quickly.
While flat designs might seem like they’ve reduced the world down to just two dimensions, that’s not the case at all. With the help of multiple overlapping layers, there is a way to imply depth with colour blocks, slight shadows, and elements that move at different speeds. Parallax scrolling is one of the biggest changes in design in the last decade.
If you’re heading in the direction of making your website clean and flat, just make sure you’re not boring. No one wants a boring site, so you may have to ask a designer to help you to make sure you’re keeping a balance between minimal and appealing. You want your site to be engaging no matter what kind of industry you’re in and what kind of users you have.
3. Mobile Is First
One of the motivating factors behind the changes to design and speed is the impact of mobile. If you look at the way that traffic is changing, you’ll find that mobile is becoming the primary way that people are using the internet. Mobile browsing in recent years vastly surpassed the amount of traffic from desktop browsing.
Mobile is now the number one way that people are accessing information on the internet.
When you’re trying to optimise for mobile devices, you need to ensure that you have your site designed correctly. If you haven’t updated your site’s design in a few years, it’s likely that it might not look good on mobile. If you have a site that doesn’t load correctly on mobile devices, your users are going to get frustrated and leave.
Beyond frustrating your users, you’re going to be punished by search engines. Search engines can now tell if your site has been optimised for mobile devices and if your site scales across different devices well. If you’re not ready for mobile, you’re going to fall behind.
If you are just designing your site for the first time or redesigning it now, you should have your designer take a mobile first approach. Since sites designed for mobile scale up more easily for desktops than vice versa, it’s to your advantage to design for mobile primarily. As the user base for desktops shrinks, it may become your lowest priority in just a few years.
4. Symmetry is Dead
Looking at the latest web design trends for 2019, you’re going to see way more broken grids and asymmetrical layouts than ever before. With most trends going outside the box, one of the easiest ways to do so is to break up the once rigid grid structure.
After years of emulating the design of newspapers, websites have now come into their own. Sites with broken grids or asymmetrical layouts are making a big splash and becoming memorable touchstones for consumers.
While just winging your design could leave you with something that doesn’t make sense or simply doesn’t look good, there’s a delicate way to design asymmetrically. There’s a way to make a design like this without looking sloppy. With a carefully established hierarchy, you can imply how to use your site without relying on tired standards.
Web Design Trends in 2019 are Vital
The web design trends of 2019 that will impact you the most will have to do with speed and usability. Users will forgive hiccups in design so long as your intent remains clear. Trust your users and they’ll trust you.
If you’re wondering whether it’s time to update your design, check out our guide to the signs that will let you know.
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