Technical Trends – 12 Must Known Elements for Modern Web Design

Website design is a continuously evolving industry. New elements and styles are continuously making their way within a blink of an eye.

However, your business could achieve big targets if these elements are incorporated thoughtfully and strategically. If done correct, you could successfully tell stories to your audiences.

If you have not yet allocated a part of your budget towards website design – it is high time that you do it. Time is high that you play your cards right, and analyze if your layout is all perfect. Could further changes be done to it? Is the call to action as per the expectation? Do you need a responsive website?  

While some elements focus on content, the others aim to improve the overall UX of the website. With so many options to choose from, it is a herculean task to what to consider and what to ignore. Helping you here, we’ve listed top 12 elements of modern design website incorporating which you can boost your site’s performance.

1) A full-width video background

Full-width video background works heavenly for small and big businesses alike on the web. This serves as a perfect way to showcase your organization’s motives simply through the home page of your website. The idea could be perfectly realized by start-ups too.

Startups can choose to display their testimonials and portfolios via full-width video in the background with some parallax scrolling and bold typography – keep the eyes rolling! However, be cautious. This might be distracting for the user if not done correctly. The key is to create a gentle movement of images without too much haphazard.

2) Speed and performance

Kinesis just nails it. As per the recent report, a user forms an opinion about your website within 0.05 seconds of the page load. Econsultancy further fuels by estimating that 47% of the people expect that the web page is loaded in 2 seconds or less.

Speed and performance have become synonymous with the quality, especially after the recent updates from Google. These two elements are likely to be ignored in the coming years, and this is what will restrict you.

While graphics and all do matter, performance and speed of your website cannot be ignored. Thus, make sure, no matter how appealing graphics, images and videos you use – speed should not be compromised at any point.

3) Scrolling

This is an era of infinite scrolling – discover more as you scroll. But the real control lies in your hands. Control the speed of the scroll, and the animation that unfolds. Keep a nice balance – it should not appear boring to the user and nor should the mystery unfold itself too soon that the suspense is lost.

4) Micro-interactions are great

Most of the time, you don’t even realize that you micro-interacted with an interface or device. Did you notice you woke up turning the alarm off? Well, this is a sort of micro-interaction. And you liked that selfie over Facebook. This again is a micro-interaction. And this micro-interaction is manifesting itself greatly in devices and app that are in use.

Don’t go overboard with these micro-interactions. You have to keep them invisible. Make sure that the interaction is more human and less robotic such that people are indulged in it without noticing.

Micro-interactions are an important part of any digital design project. There would hardly be any app or website that doesn’t involve the interaction of humans – be it a status update or a quick result of an action.

This overall makes your design more intuitive, adaptable and enhances its usability. You get a step closer in the process of developing a human-centered design, and this is what pleases the users – crafting human-like moments vividly.

5) Responsive and adaptive design

Undoubtedly, responsive design was sure to make it to the list. As per skillcrush, if the first search result is not mobile-friendly, 40% of the people will switch to a different search result.  As per a report of econsultancy, 62% of the companies that had mobile websites witnessed an increase in sales.

What better proof could there be to supplement the fact that responsive is the new trend? If you haven’t gone mobile yet, jump into it without any second thought. Either get a mobile website separately designed – targeting the users on mobile, tablets and phablets. Or have a responsive design done, such that the design adapts itself as per the screen sizes.

To achieve this:

• Instead of giving some fixed range values as the dimensions of the images, use percentage to define them.
• Use responsive and server side – RESS
• Be aware that a lot many JavaScript components won’t work on smaller devices. Thus, use conditional loading.

But responsive is just not about it. There are other ways too through which you can ensure that website is rendered perfectly, no matter what device is used. And frankly speaking, customers don’t even bother about what is going on in the backend, till they are getting what they expected.

Adaptive web designing is yet another factor that you could focus on. It makes use of various components of progressive enhancement that focus on the user and not on the web browser.

Further, to make your web design look more attractive, you can make use of ribbons that are responsive to the window/screen size.

6) Make use of rich animations wisely

The design is all about telling stories. And you become a better storyteller if animations are employed. It makes the overall experience a lot more entertaining and interactive. As beautiful the experience it makes, sticking the animation anywhere senselessly can destroy the user experience to the same level.

– Loading animations
Nothing is more boring than a loading page with white background. Loading animations tend to entertain the users and keep them hooked in such cases. Loading animations could add stars to a simple flat and minimalistic design.
But, keep them simple and choose the ones that match the personality of your website. They should be in same color coordination as your theme.

– Hover animation
Hover animation is known for providing an instant visual feedback. User hovers the mouse over the content, and the hover animation just surprises the user by bringing before him the hidden details amazingly.

– Non-scrolling menus and navigation
They help you save the screen space and add to the overall aesthetic look of the website. They only come out when a specific button triggering their action is clicked.

– Motion animation
Well, this might serve as your ace if played properly. If yours is an ecommerce website, just catch more eyes with motion animation. You can make use of this effective technique while displaying your product from various angles – upside and downside, left and right. Motion undoubtedly catches the user’s attention more than anything. This helps you gain the interest of your users – and this is what you want, right?

7) Web fonts

Typography is all set to hit its all-new high in the forthcoming years. With the likes of Google fonts, Typekit and others taking the internet by storm, typography has become increasingly popular. The new fonts which are simpler, clear and crisp are sure to replace the age old fonts like Arial, Georgia, Verdana and others.

Web fonts have a direct impact on the looks of a website and thus, care should be taken that fonts are not overruling the web design fetching the whole attention.

8) Convertible content

The design industry has evolved like anything. More and more online businesses are now focusing on the concept which makes use of the mix of both design and content. The content that could be converted to arange of formats is on the rise. Websites like Slideshare and Piktographics give you the freedom to convert your content in the form of a presentation slide or infographic likewise. Not only this, there are various other formats as well the content creators you to choose from. Storytelling has become an art now, and this is only going to experience a steep rise.

9) Live product previews

One thing that has experienced most revolutionary growth is the landing page design. And the most recent trend is the addition of live product previews on landing pages. The video showcases the virtual tour of the whole product. This was recently adopted by Slack, wherein the vector graphics covering the slack interface was illustrated beautifully.

10) Major attention over UX design

UX design remains an undisputed center of attraction for all. 5 years back, UX was barely popular. But now with the advent of free UX ebooks and UX stack exchange, you could easily make the combination of interface design and UX work like anything, with the end result being a fantastic user experience.

11) Card layouts

They were first made popular by Pinterest and since then, there was no looking back for them. The card layout could easily be mimicked used jQuery and Masonry. The card layout serves the websites that have lots of data. Card layouts are a huge hit among online websites, and websites like The Next Web and UGSMAG are already showcasing it.

12) Extra-large product images

You’ve got some unique features in your product. Why not highlight those and catch eyes? This is the simple logic that various B2B websites are now displaying large product images on their websites. These images are not only responsive but easily scannable as well. This instantly catches the visitor’s attention helping him fetch a solid understanding of the product through images.

There is a lot more to the must-known elements, but then you don’t need to follow them blindly. Be careful and pick the right ones that suit your business.