Posted by: I found myself with a few spare minutes whilst I relaxed with a cup of coffee this morning and decided to look at the latest things in Web design.
Simplification
Well of course, trends can only be really confirmed as one looks back saying “well the trend last year was XYZ” and much else is speculation, but I was interested to read that one of the big trends expected to be seen this year, is what I’m going to put under the umbrella of “simplification”. This may be due to the anticipated mobile friendly algorithm mentioned below.
I say simplification because I read that in contrast to the trend over the last few years of big background images with titles or sales messages written over them, people are simplifying the whole design of their website as examples with plain text titles without any background image and limiting the amount of colours used. This of course may be due to Google’s much anticipated mobile friendly algorithm mentioned below.
Of course there are many other good reasons to embrace such simplification. The first being speed. The smaller the file size of the page – images, colours etc, the less time it will take for users to download however fast your connection speed. Simplification should provide ease of navigation and a sleeker site and a better experience for users and prospective customers along with reducing development time. I know this is easier said than done for many developers and seems to go against the grain with” feature creep” a recurrent problem.
There was more on the trends issue, but as I said earlier, I was fascinated to read this particular trend., I was part owner of a web development company some years ago and our focus was to produce quick, clear websites which would help our clients increase their revenue. Of course there was more to it just than the simplicity of the site such as clarity of sales message and ease of making an enquiry was key to our reputation, so to me it’s a trend that’s turning back.
Mobile Friendly
Another trend, which I was a little involved with as you can imagine, is that of mobile sites. As people have recognised the importance of the vastly growing number of people who access and buy from mobile devices there has (as one might expect) been a growing number of companies who have mobile sites. These mobile sites have most often been as a compliment to the main company site and the better ones, co-ordinated with the main site. The trend though is for a growing number of companies to class the mobile site as the main site and adopt features from the mobile site on the main site. Given Google’s mobile friendly algorithm update on 21st April I would think that this is no longer a trend but a necessity. You may want to take a look at this Search Engine Land’s Blog http://searchengineland.com/much-traffic-will-lose-upcoming-mobile-seo-pocalypse-216564
It will be interesting to see what has happened at the end of the year.