When you’re running an online business, among the most important endeavors for you to consider involves creating an online presence for your brand. Having a website is essential for any business that wants to realize continued success in the age of the internet. A total of 96 percent of people in the U.S. shop online regularly, whether your business offers a product or service, this means that you can’t afford not to have an effective website that represents your company online.
Without a web presence, you risk online customers opting for a competitor over your brand. While creating a website is the first step towards building a strong online presence, it’s just as important that you maintain and update the website that you build if you want to keep modern customers engaged. The wants and needs of your target audience will change on a regular basis, which means that your website needs to be up to date and account for these latest changes and trends in the industry.
Design trends typically differ from year to year. At the moment (mid-late 2019), a minimalist design approach with less written content and more imagery is considered to be among the top design methods for websites. If you don’t update your website to match current design trends, there’s a possibility that your customers will be unimpressed and decide to take their business elsewhere.
Another key factor in customer retention involves the user experience and user interface of your website. Even if you have a beautiful design for your website, customers are going to quickly become frustrated if the website is difficult to navigate or comes with slow load times from page to page.
With a top-tier user interface and experience, customer retention will be much easier. Different businesses will have different features that they focus on, which is why you need to know which features are necessary for the various types of companies. Once you identify the features that are ideal for your company, you can get started on creating a website design that’s visually appealing, highly functional, and relevant to the interests of your target audience.
Common Website Features
Before you consider adding some modern features that will spruce up your website and make it more appealing to your target audience, you must first make sure that your website is outfitted with the more common features that every website should have. The basic features that must be implemented into your website include a navigation bar for easy travel to all site pages, content that drives business efforts, chat support, quality imagery to keep written content engaging, and video media where appropriate, the latter of which is essential when catering to the increasingly media-driven consumer. Each of these features are simple to implement and will provide you with a basic website design that you can spruce up in the future.
Interactive Website Features
It’s going to be difficult to increase your customer conversion rates if you haven’t implemented any interactive website features. Interactive features are a big hit in modern design trends because of how they are able to increase the likelihood that the site visitor becomes engaged with the content. Among the best interactive features that you can include in your website design are scroll-triggered animations, which allow animations to be outfitted into your website design that are triggered as the user scrolls down the page. This allows your users to browse your website and determine whether or not they’re interested in your content before they are engaged by your marketing CTAs, qualifying your visitors and improving your conversation rates.
Placing animation throughout your website (in a tasteful manner) helps to promote user interactivity and should bolster audience retention rates, both of which will increase customer loyalty with your brand or business. However, these animations need to be used sparingly to ensure that your website doesn’t look amateurish. In other words, you don’t want to rely on animations to keep your site visitors engaged. If you implement animations to improve site usability instead of using them for visual flair, the visitors to your website will appreciate the additions.
UX/UI Website Trends in 2019
While some website owners attempt to avoid using UX and UI trends for their website because they want to be unique, it’s important to understand that trends occur for a reason. When a design feature becomes a trend, it does so because the modern customer finds that the feature is compelling. If you want to provide your site visitors with a good reason to stick around, you’re going to need to implement at least a few UX/UI trends into your website. Website design trends attract attention and viewers to continue looking at a website because these trends are largely based on expectations.
Currently, site visitors expect to be engaged, which is why many of the latest design trends center around deepening engagement through video content and other modern site features. Over a decade ago, site users expected that they would need to wade through numerous popup ads before they would be able to load the intended page. With the advent of less invasive marketing techniques and better user interfaces, the modern user expects to be provided with fast loading, beautiful imagery, and engaging content.
Most of the UX/UI trends for 2019 are based on the ever-changing expectations of the audience. When you equip current website design trends onto your website, the user will become more engaged with the site, which will attract them to continue looking at other pages.
Engaging Video Content
As technology evolves, so does our bandwidth and the ability to deliver larger files such as video. Five years ago, outfitting videos into a web page meant that most users would experience slowdown when attempting to navigate the page, which caused them to have a bad user experience. Because of the increase in bandwidth and connection speeds over the years, video loading times no longer negatively affect the user experience. When these videos are properly optimized and used in a creative manner, they can be a great way for you to showcase your product or explain your service.
If the page on your website is specifically meant to showcase a product of yours, being able to display a video of the product as opposed to still images should be beneficial at providing the customer with what they’re looking for. Video backgrounds are also a great way to draw attention to your content. These backgrounds are typically used in landing page header content, which gives you the perfect opportunity to provide your site visitors with a fantastic first impression. Since videos are known to be more engaging than images, you’ll likely have a better chance of keeping visitors on your website if the first thing they see is a video in the background that highlights your brand or a product that you offer.
Large, Attention Grabbing Titles
It may be surprising to learn that large and attention-grabbing titles are actually in style this year. Some of the typography that you use on your website should be large, bold, and creative if you want to attract users to your website. This typography can be used in a variety of ways to great effect. For instance, you could get rid of background imagery altogether and present the title as the main element of the page.
If the words are compelling and creative, site visitors will likely be intrigued by the uniqueness of this approach. Many modern website will combine beautiful background images with large and bold titles, which can make for a very visually-appealing website. By using large titles, you’ll be able to emphasize the words in the title, which will allow you to focus on the main selling points for the product or service that you offer.
Non-Traditional Scrolling
While traditional scrolling works well, it’s a site feature that’s expected from users, which is why you should consider implementing non-traditional scrolling. While there are several types of non-traditional scrolling, likely the best example of this is with horizontal scrolling. While traditional scrolling goes up and down along the page, this type of scrolling takes you from left to right, which provides you with more options for how you want to design your website.
For instance, if you own an interior design firm, you could create a page on your website wherein users would be able to scroll horizontally through different designs that you’ve created over the years, which would provide you with a fantastic opportunity to showcase your work. While this type of scrolling doesn’t work for every business, it may be able to give you a leg up on the competition.
Content & Graphic Animations
You’re not going to be able to keep site visitors engaged for lengthy periods of time if your website doesn’t have well-written content throughout. However, many modern users don’t believe that good content is enough, which is why it’s highly recommended that you use graphic animations throughout the website in order to keep the viewers entertained while they browse your content. Complex animation can draw a user in and keep them scrolling through the article they’re reading or the product they’re looking at. At the very least, you should include some micro interactions on your website that improve website navigation and allow the site visitor to interact more with your site.
Fluid/Organic Design and Elements
Modern website designs focus primarily on providing users with a sleek and stylish website, which is why one of the top trends for 2019 involves fluid/organic designs and elements as opposed to straight lines and flat designs. As such, standard rectangle, square, and circle shapes aren’t being used as often as they once were. It’s important to understand that the straight lines and common shapes seen on the internet don’t occur often in real life. The shape of a lake is never a perfect circle, which is something that modern websites are starting to take into account with the design elements that they use. By using shapes and lines that are more fluid and organic, your design should feel more approachable to site visitors.
Website Development & Trends Emerging
Web design trends in past years have greatly advanced in just a short amount of time, which means that you need to update your website regularly to follow these trends if you want to keep the attention of your target audience. For instance, image carousels were once a very popular feature in website design. These days, this feature is considered to be distracting and very rarely is able to convert users into return customers. Some good UI/UX website designs for 2019 include ones that personalize user interactions via feature customization as well as ones that allow for full-screen background video and images.
You could also use visual storytelling if you want your brand to have a more personal feel to it. A great UI/UX feature for mobile sites involves the implementation of buttonless interactions, which allows the site visitor to interact with the page via gestures instead of button presses.
High readability is also important if you want visitors to remain on your website long enough to purchase a product or subscribe to a newsletter, which means that you need to carefully choose the fonts that you use. With so many different design options to choose from, you can select the features that best suit your brand or business.
Conclusion
Designing and managing a website may be time-consuming for many companies that are looking to grow their online business without making too many mistakes. However, creating an appealing design and managing the website once it’s been placed online is likely the simplest and most effective method for growing your company, which is why it’s recommended that you obtain the services of a professional web design firm to help you manage your online presence.
If you’re looking to build a new website that makes use of the most popular and current web design trends, contact our local Long Beach team of web professionals at Bryt Designs today!
