Updating your website? Stay away from these design trends!

Updating your website? Stay away from these design trends!

If you are planning a new web design, then it’s important to get things right from the concept phase. Avoid these design trends to make sure your new site is a hit:

Hiding everything in a hamburger menu

From fashion and interior design to web development – minimalism is a key trend these days. It’s easy to see why people would want to declutter their websites, but don’t let people land on your home page and not be able to find any text, images, links or buttons. The ‘hamburger menu’ isn’t just something that we’re not a fan of, it’s hard for visually impaired people and non-web savvy web users to find and navigate websites with this navigation structure and menu. If users can’t easily find what they are looking for on the front page of your site, they are probably not going to stick around for very long.

Missing search bars

Regardless of the navigation structure and menu options that you choose for your website design, make sure you have a search bar. Website visitors know that if they are struggling to find something on a website, they will usually be able to type a keyword, product or service into a search bar and find relevant pages within the site, so make sure you are offering people this functionality. Every page on your website should have a search bar that is up top and easy to find.

A common web design trend these days is to replace the search bar with an icon of a magnifying glass. So instead of needing a lot of space for the search bar, you only need to dedicate a small space for the image of the magnifying icon.

Odd fonts

Somewhere along the way, people decided that black text on a white background is overrated. There is plenty of room to experiment with a warmer hue background and a softer black font, but don’t stray too far from the norm.

It’s understandable that people want their website to stand out from the millions of other sites online, but using dark grey fonts on a light grey background, for example, isn’t the way to go. Make sure that the readability of your website’s content is very good, or you won’t have anyone reading your content.

Carousels

Carousels, also known as slideshows, don’t really remove functionality from the site but make sure that you’re not adding a slideshow that doesn’t provide any functionality, either. Slideshows can easily become distracting for website visitors and a lot of extra images can add to the load time of your web pages.

WSI New Media Marketing is a leading web design company in Greensboro, North Carolina.  Contact us for responsive web design services today.