The future of modern web design

| Web design

The future of modern web design

Web design is continually evolving to improve the usability, visual appeal and functionality of a site and of course this can be applied to any estate agent website design. It is clear to see that web design trends are pushing towards creating less complicated, easy to use and more sophisticated designs.

Web design trends do come and go almost on a year by year basis but we can predict some web design trends that will engulf the design industry in the future:

1. Responsive will dominate

By 2015, mobile internet usage will overtake the conventional desktop and laptop usage. Many estate agents have aimed to counter this by getting a mobile website; however this still means catering to two separate websites which is soon likely to become an issue with Google and does not give the best user experience for all devices as a responsive website could.

2. Flat design

Flat design focuses on the needs of the growing mobile user; designers want to construct design elements that appear smoothly on flat screens, over the old flashy logos, buttons and icons.

Flat design removes a lot of the complicated patterns, textures, shadows, gradients and other shiny effects instead focusing on simplicity. Flat design still looks interactive without having the more refined graphics, making it more appealing to the user.

3. More Scrolling and Less Clicking

Scrolling is becoming more popular than clicking. This is most likely due to it being easier for mobile users to use and navigate a site by scrolling rather than clicking and waiting for new pages to load. Users now want to be able to view as much information as possible, rather than clicking to open each individual page.

Multi-page website still do have more power for SEO so this type of design probably won’t start becoming more popular until search engines are able to favour the single page websites, however it is clear to see that smartphones have had an impact on the way we use websites.  

4. Videos

When we say videos we don’t mean promotional video ads but HTML5 videos that can run in the background of your webpages. We can process visuals faster than any other form of information so if done right you could make a huge impact by highlighting the advantages of using your services in just a few seconds.

5. Less is so much more

Everyone on the web wants websites that are easy to use and in many cases great design comes from minimalistic websites.

Some websites may come up with inventive design methods but the user will eventually prefer a website that has clear navigation, loads fast and is easy to use. Keep it clean and simple, overcomplicating things can truly destroy a website.

Luke Stanley