With rapid change and advancement in technology, website design trends too encounter betterment, upliftment and change at a similar pace.
Website features and design elements that once were contemporary and innovative might become cliched in current years.
Loss of conversion and engagement owing to outdated website design look is one of the last things any business/entity would want.
Here, I will share a few of the current innovations, standards, and digital technology trends that can help your website design look up to date in 2021.
1. Smart Video
Video for long has remained a must have element for most websites. It is owing to the fact that videos are engaging and connect with the target group quickly.
Though videos are a great element to have, it requires to be well thought of. It is here smart videos come to play. Smart videos are videos with a meaning and purpose.
Those days are gone, when embedding a video from YouTube on your website was a must for quick connect. A well thought, good quality video is much better as compared to having numerous haphazard videos.
2. White Space
Use of white space is all about endowing the content room with the right breath, not cramming up several data on the screen.
Experience is relaxing for visitors on the website as the content stands out and readability is ameliorated.
3. Flat Design
In website design, flat design is referred to as minimalism. It is still typically linked with numerous white spaces. Ensure to be minimalist doesn’t mean going all white.
One of the best examples of the site that performs colorful minimalism really nicely is of Shopify. Every page of their features bold background color mix with a clean text as well as minimal design element to grab attention of the website visitors.
4. Material design
Introduced back in 2014 by Google, material design is a form of design language.
Conventional website design appears flat whereas material design introduces web designers with shadows and colors to mimic physical surrounding along with textures. Icon of google for software suite is one of the best examples of a perfect material design.
5. Text only image
Noticed that newspapers most of the time put their most appealing and essential information/data above their fold to enhance sales. Likewise, websites too are adopting the same tactic for improved traction.
It is an ongoing trend to get users’ attention who often are bombarded with various web pages daily. To make their search simpler and easier, web designer are eliminating the classic background image in the hero section to replace it with attractive typography.
A unique, bold font can be just the right thing to avail the attention of users’ quickly.
6. Speed of website and page speed is the king
Ultra fast loading time is a crucial website design standard. For SEO and UX since years, quick loading time is an important factor and this continues to remain top priority for all the websites that are looking for better conversion and ranking.
Various studies reveal more than half of the internet browsers expect websites to load within 2 seconds after clicking the link.
In case, if it takes over 3 seconds to load a website, your target audience probably will leave, and would not come back again.
Thus, the performance of the website has a direct impact on the company’s bottom line.
7. Smart content load time for enhanced user experience
Most of us may be guilty of resource-heavy sites owing to several graphical constituents and 3rd party integrations that slow down sites. Luckily, there are various ways to build smart and user-friendly websites that download just the content users want and need to view.
Slow loading, as well as infinite scroll, are old backdated technologies. Top social networks used this years ago, especially when it was about infinity scroll. Also, the approach is popular with websites that are one page long.
All the sites must consider how using 1 or 2 technological approaches may assist them to outperform their competition. Such features can assist ameliorate the user experience of website visitors that ameliorates your ranking and conversion rate.
Lazy load makes sure the website browser such as Chrome, Firefox, etc can download just the content you view on screen without having to waste valuable server resources as well as time to load the offscreen content, which may never be seen.
Various website users never reach the bottom of the webpage. Thus, why load the content and elevate website load times. The better approach is to load content as they start scrolling down the webpage and get closer to it.
8. Personalized content as per user’s browsing history and geolocation
Suppose, you visited the website and after that came back to it some hours or days after to view the content arranged in a different manner.
When you try pulling the same up on your mobile phone for the first time or some other browser, you will view the previous content that you viewed the initial time you visited the site.
It is no secret, maximum advanced sites track users browsing history & know their locations.
However, cutting-edge website design services (agencies) would advise their target audience to display dynamic content, content on the basis of your user behavior or what websites understand about the user.
Custom content generated for the users coming back to your site for a second or even third time can enhance conversion. Users experience this each time they use Google as their search engine.
Individuals looking for nearby shopping malls in North Carolina or Raleigh will get various outcomes as compared to users located in other towns.
Directory sites also can identify the kind of food you relish. If you re-evaluated or even saved Indian restaurants in the past, it may make complete sense that the site would give Indian restaurants more importance in your searches.
For e-commerce websites, personalized content is important. Displaying currently viewed, liked, or saved products to online shopaholics can result in enhanced conversions.
Calling attention to abandoned cart articles for returning users is also important to maintain a higher conversion rate.
9. Lead nurturing forms that are integrated with CRM tool
Lead generation form is a crucial element of the marketing site. Those website owners who want to know about their site visitors, cannot ask a lot of questions to their target audience at any specific time.
Instead, they can place dynamic/progressive contact forms on landing pages as well as display fields as per lead journey.
Ideally, site owners cannot display a lot of fields in the form, but can always adjust form fields as per data that owners already know in regard to leads.
At first conversion, questions like name, email address and company can be asked and on the next conversion opportunity title, phone number, company size and company revenue fields can be asked.
Site’s CRM stores data of leads. CRM even can identify the leads when they visit again to the site and display the form fields on landing pages.
10. Human like chatbots
Chatbots are the next feature that has become popular and will continue to remain so in 2021. With the advancement of artificial intelligence as well as machine learning, site owners can expect chatbots to become the essential norm for customer service requests as well as personal shopping.
For instance, if a particular target audience visits a site looking for phone support, the chatbot can let the user know about the support.
This can result in a positive experience on customers’ part and save the company and customer support cost linked with talking to live individuals.
Sanjay Dey