Whether you’re running a business or just maintaining a personal website to support your personal projects, there’s a tough reality to face. Your website has a lot of competitors for people’s time. At any given time, there are around 200 million active websites.
The good news is that many of those sites are foreign language sites. They’re still competition, but it’s competition for a smaller number of multi-lingual visitors. Even so, you must scrape for every advantage and that takes staying on top of digital marketing and website trends.
Not sure what website trends matter for 2022? Keep reading and we’ll cover the essentials.
User Experience
One trend that will never go out of style is good user experience on your website. You must think about user experience from the minute you start designing a website or hire someone to do it for you.
Everything about a successful website makes the visitor’s life easier. That extends from load times and navigation to the website layout and information availability.
In essence, you should ask yourself over and over, how can I make this easier for the visitor? When you stop finding ways to do that, you’re probably close to a website with a really good user experience.
Imagery Multilayers
Minimalism has found a lot of favor in recent years, in part because it typically makes designing a good user experience easier. Designers shy away from anything that smacks of visual clutter.
Yet, a minimalist design approach isn’t necessarily the best approach for every business or individual. Let’s say that you’re a photographer.
The idea of having a photo gallery that looks like every other photographer’s online photo gallery doesn’t leave you feeling enthused.
Imagery multilayers offer you a chance to show off some of your best images right on the homepage in a visually interesting way.
Retro Looks
Another design trend that’s picked up some ground recently is retro design options. For example, the typographic hero image is popular right now.
Rather than focus on an image as the first thing people see, the site presents a text message as the core visual. This hearkens back to the early days of the web when images ate up too much bandwidth, so most sites were made almost entirely of text.
A different approach with a similar end goal, evoking nostalgia, is the Memphis design approach. Memphis design features the kinds of chaotic patterns and borderline gaudy colors that were popular in the 1980s.
Website Trends and You
If you’re looking for some key website trends for the year, start with user experience. Not only will you keep your visitors on your site longer, search engines evaluate it as part of their ranking approach.
If you’re of a creative bent, imagery multilayers can work for websites where images play a crucial role. Think in terms of art, design, or photography websites.
Embracing some visual retro-magic can yield dividends with patterns and bright colors piquing visitors’ interest.
Enfuse Creative Design offers website design and marketing services. For more information to discuss an upcoming project, contact Enfuse today.