A high quality, compelling website is the key to effective customer acquisition. A website is often the first impression a customer has of your company or business so it should be designed to impress. A quality website should be professional, informative, and, above all, engaging and compelling. Remember, a truly stunning website is just as much about amazing graphics and jaw-dropping design as it is about quality content. To take your website to the next level in 2014 be sure to pay attention to these trends.
1. Responsive Web Design.
People aren’t just using computers to navigate the Internet anymore. These days a good chunk of Internet users are accessing websites via their mobile devices, including cell phones and tablets. This is where responsive web design comes into to play. Responsive web design ensures that your website looks good not matter the device a viewer is using to navigate it. Responsive web design makes use of a fluid, grid concept. Page sizes are derived from percentages, which are relative, as opposed to pixels or points, which are static. The website automatically conforms its layout to the user’s device, facilitating easy navigation. Basically, your company can’t afford not to have a responsive website in 2014. It helps to leverage mobile traffic and saves you time and money on web development, eliminating the need to create a stand-alone mobile site. There are also tangible SEO benefits: responsive websites are consistently ranked higher by mobile search engines such as Google and Bing.
2. Single Page Layouts.
Simple and elegant, single page layouts are one of the biggest web design trends of 2014. Even renowned New York City Hotel NoMad has jumped on board the single page layout bandwagon, as has brand communications firm Purple Orange. In this case, simplicity is power. There is no need to direct users, bandwidth usage is reduced, and it is incredibly easy to get your point across. And these single page layouts are totally sleek and utterly sophisticated.
3. Parallax Scrolling.
What is parallax scrolling, you ask? A graphic technique that actually dates back to early video games, in this innovative scrolling technique background images move at a slower speed than foreground images. This creates a unique illusion of depth and allows for stunning animation, letting designers craft websites with a whole new level of interactive user viewing. With this technique companies can carefully guide visitors through a website via storytelling. For example, luxury car brand Lexus has used parallax scrolling as conduit for digital storytelling, as has prominent New York City advertising firm Madwell. This technique is especially good for call to action pages, boosting the average length of page visits.
