In order to have a well-designed website, there are several things you need to know. This list has some important website trends for 2022.
The online presence that your company has in your industry will play a large role when it comes to its future success. After all, you can’t expect to maximize your sales numbers if people aren’t able to find and interact with your brand online. Simply having a website isn’t enough, however.
You’ll need to understand contemporary website trends in order to make your site as engaging and intuitive as possible. Let’s explore everything that you need to know.
Dark Mode
It should come as no surprise the dark mode is one of the most popular trends you can expect to see in 2022. In fact, you may have even noticed notable websites and applications giving users the option to turn on dark mode.
Put simply, dark mode is much easier on the eyes than white backgrounds are. Although it may be slightly more difficult to read large blocks of text in some cases, you will find that your general browsing experience is much better.
As you might guess, this is imperative to consider for your business website design. If running a dark theme is conducive to the content on your website, it’s always recommended to do so.
At the very least, you should give your users the opportunity to switch between light and dark themes. It’s also important to understand that adding a dark background doesn’t inherently make a website well-designed.
You’ll need to thoroughly test it in order to see whether or not the experience is truly improved.
Interactive Content
If you want more users to engage with your website, you’ll need to offer them different ways in which they can engage. More specifically, this means creating interactive content.
Of all website ideas, this is one of the most important to keep in mind. Fortunately, building a website with interactive content is relatively straightforward. This could come in the form of online calculators, poles, or quizzes.
In fact, there is a virtually endless number of possibilities regarding the type of interactive content you can develop. Be sure to consult your analytics, though.
If you find that many users aren’t engaging with certain content, it will be in your best interest to try out a different option instead. So, keep this detail in mind moving forward.
Dynamic Scrolling
Another term for this element is single-page scrolling.
As the name suggests, this means all of the user’s scrolling takes place within a single page. This heavily contrasts typical website design, which requires users to click links to navigate through different pages.
Dynamic scrolling is a highly efficient way to illustrate a story to your audience. So, it works great on sales pages, product pages, and about pages. You could even take things a step further and integrate parallax scrolling.
For those who are unfamiliar with this term, it refers to a scenario where the background moves slower than the foreground as you scroll. This creates a smooth, enjoyable experience for the user that they will likely strongly prefer over conventional website design.
Optimized Load Speed
Unfortunately, slow loading times can easily drive people away from your website. In fact, a page that takes even more than a few seconds to load could cause people to head back to Google. This also comes with a chance of them visiting a competitor instead.
Not only will slow sites become essentially obsolete in 2022 but there will be a race to establish the fastest loading speed among industry competition. So, businesses that do not prioritize this metric may find that their online performance fails to meet their goals.
To make your website load faster, there’s a handful of methods you can use. Deferring JavaScript loading, optimizing image size, and reducing server response time can all go a long way.
Negative Space
When it comes to web design, less is often more.
People are used to being bombarded with online advertisements and large numbers of images on every web page that they visit. Over time, this can easily become mentally fatiguing.
This is where simplicity and minimalism step in. For example, compare a website with tons of pop-up windows, ads, etc. with a site like Wikipedia. Assuming that both sites contain the same information, the vast majority of users would likely find that Wikipedia is far more pleasant to browse.
Keep in mind that minimalism is not an excuse for lazy web design. Your site should still be fully functional, intuitive, and provide everything that your users are looking for.
When it comes to aesthetics, however, negative space can do a lot with very little.
Dynamic Content
This is one of the most important trends to keep an eye on in the coming years.
Dynamic content is website content that changes depending on a handful of factors related to the user. For example, users may see different web pages based on their geographic location. The information they see could also change based on their past web history.
To put this into context, someone who has never visited a certain website before could be directed to a welcome page that details everything they need to know about the site. After they return to the site in the future, they might be directed to a page that welcomes them back. There’s a large number of different possibilities regarding how you can leverage this.
Optimization For Voice Search
As time goes on, more and more people are beginning to use voice search as opposed to manually typing out keywords and phrases. This means that your website will need to be optimized for this situation.
After all, there’s a strong difference between someone typing “best Mexican restaurants in LA” and speaking “what restaurants have the best Mexican food in Los Angeles.” If you do not adapt to this change, you will likely find that your website traffic diminishes over time.
This will simply be due to the fact that people are no longer searching for the keywords and phrases that they used to even though they are looking for the same information.
Bold Colors
The use of bold colors will likely see a sharp increase in 2022.
Fortunately, this is one of the easiest elements that you can implement into your web design. Additionally, it pairs extremely well with minimalism, making bold colors great to use with white space. Of course, this doesn’t mean that you should overwhelm your audience with the colors on your site.
This could easily prove to be overstimulating and may deter people from interacting with your brand online. The good news, though, is that the use of color can easily help you stand out from brands that focus primarily on neutrals. When in doubt, you could use bold colors as accents to a neutral color scheme in order to make certain parts of your design more captivating.
You should also consider whether or not the abundant use of color aligns with your overall brand. It might be fine for a business that sells artisan flowers online or energy drinks.
It might not be the best option for a cybersecurity consulting firm. As long as you handle color appropriately, it can prove to be one of the strongest tools at your disposal.
Chatbots
Chatbots have seen a large spike in popularity over recent years. We can expect this trend to continue as time goes on. There is often no viable alternative to the use of this type of software.
After all, it allows you to accommodate customer questions and concerns 24/7 instead of only within business hours. It also allows you to forego the need of hiring a full-time customer support representative.
Machine learning will also help these programs become much more effective. Over time, they will begin to grow efficient at guiding customers and understanding the issues they face. We may even reach a point where chatbots are able to help automate a large segment of the sales process.
In the near future, however, there will be a great form of support for your client-facing employees to take advantage of.
The Above Website Trends Can’t Be Overlooked
This will provide you with a solid foundation of knowledge that can help you bring your vision to life. Keep the above website trends in mind so that you can ensure that you stay on the right track.
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