With the online user experience continuously changing, advancements in technology are emerging all of the time, it’s time to see how you can create a small business website that will help you stay ahead of the curve in both web design and development. These days sites incorporate design including cinemagraphs, motion photos and also include progressive web apps. We take a look at the upcoming web design features that you need to include to ensure your new small business website is responsive.
1 – Emotionally intelligent design
The human-machine relationship has become more emotional than rational, emotional design encourages the humanisation of technology and includes cartoon mascots and chat boxes. It helps to drive engagement with delightful and variable rewards that keep users clicking. Emotional sensing technology has been used for experimenting and has helped to redefine emotional design, at the moment, apps and chat boxes don’t know how you feel and if you’re having a good or bad day. They may come across as engaging or delightful but they’ll also lack emotional intelligence, so using this technology and considering emotion as the context is a step towards emotional intelligence.
2 – Colours & Branding
Going against the usual design grain has become a trend, using bold, bright colours and gradients have come back and are set to make a statement in web design. Some businesses may also find that their customers respond better to bright colours that draw them in, they’re refreshing and revitalising which is a good start if it fits your brand and audience. Helping you to get a better understanding of how effective eCommerce sites use colours.
3 – Mobile responsive web design
Mobile responsive web design is an approach that’s widely implemented in the web designing process and enables the web pages to render well across various mobile devices including smartphones, desktops, tablets and laptops, having different window or screen sizes and resolutions. Web developers, especially front end developers, will focus on creating mobile-friendly websites as the users interact with the website more through smartphones.
Given the growth in smartphone users, there’s been a large uplift in website traffic, this change will drive us to the conclusion that people’s expectations regarding how a website should appear on a mobile device have changed too. The following are a few stats that denote the importance of having mobile responsiveness.
- Nearly 60% of internet users access in 2019 happens through mobiles
- Mobile phones drive 50% of total e-commerce revenue
- The total number of adults making use of smartphones is 77%
- 94% of online visitors judge a website based on the responsiveness of a specific website.
4 – Animation
The rise of animation in the past two years has been very rapid, it’s predicted that animation is one of the most powerful trends in web design and will get highly popular amongst designers and users. The use of CSS3 technology has made traditional web design more vivid and easy to use.
Since CSS3, the animation is considered relatively new in the UI field and there’s a lot more room for the development of its application in web design.
5 – Minimalism
One of the classic web design trends, minimalism is synonymous with simplicity, often it’s the first choice for web designs and it embodies the ‘less is more’ principle and the fewer interface design elements the better.
With modern life being so fast and dynamic, people have insufficient time to process information, good design will enable users to digest information in a short time and this is best achieved by using fewer elements.
Should it be using white design, contract or clear typography, a well-designed website will make navigation easy and provide accurate information, this will make it good for user experience and a well designed CTA will also encourage page conversions.
6 – Video background
One of the best ways to catch a customers attention is to create a website with a dynamic video background, moving objects tend to be more attractive. Compared to text or still images, short videos are a more convenient way to provide information and allow the user to quickly understand the characteristic of the web page or product.
The video will also help to increase user time on page, this is good for SEO and conversion rates, Facebook’s prioritising video posts is solid proof of the medium’s effectiveness. Moreover, given that we live in an era of diversified information, the application of dynamic elements like video backgrounds will gradually increase.