Current web design trends – an overview

Web design trends keep on changing with every passing year or within a period of few months. There had been significant changes last year whose impact can be seen more clearly in this year.

Popularity in the mobile device space has immensely increased in the sense that Smartphones and tablets like the iPad have made the interaction between users better and have facilitated easier accessibility to contents. Moreover, now people can take more and more advantage of the latest and the optimized features.

And this is possible because of web standards like HTML5, web fonts and CSS3, but What about the small businesses? It actually becomes difficult for them to stick to the latest designing trends because of factors like cost of the redesigns and the need for reaching a wide range of users.

Here, let’s discuss certain new technological designing trends which can prove useful for small businesses.

1. Goodbye Flash

Continuous debates in the past show that people are moving away from Flash. But that does not mean it serves no useful purpose. It still continues to give interactive designs and a few Rich Interactive Applications. However, for those small business owners, not showing any type of experience, trading Flash for HTML5, JavaScript and CSS3 would sound more sensible. Why? Actually the problem is that Flash does not work on most of the mobile devices and if they do, all the elements are not supported reliably.

Suppose, you visit a website from your mobile and are not being able to access it completely, like; unable to access the contact information, list of products and services or location information for the reason that navigation or core content was built in Flash. Will you like this? Obviously no!

The old circa-2005 Flash template is no more a very good option, and for good results, I would advise you to switch on to a modern system soon this year.

2. Web Fonts

Web font has been one of the important factors in web designing. It is not at all easy to customize the font .Because of technical restrictions; vibrant fonts used on the web have been limited to a small subset of styles. As a result, most designers used either the small selection of web-safe fonts or workarounds such as: text images or Flash in order to replace texts.

But there is a different scenario today regarding this. Today, you can use web fonts for your site without breaking your head too much into it. And the credit for this goes to services like TypeKit, Fonts.com Web Fonts and Google Web Fonts which allow you to use fonts at lower costs.

You can follow the latest trends in fonts like Web Open Font Format, JS lettering, taking mobile support or choosing Web Font while customizing Web App. If you wish to know more about these latest trends, you can get the information here: trends in web fonts.

3. Compatible and optimized sites

It’s time to make your sites fully compatible on different browsers as well as different devices and fully optimized, as, every website today wishes to make their site friendly to small screen. These are few tools that help you optimize your website for mobile devices:

• MoFuse and MoFuse Premium
• Mippin
• mobiSiteGalore

To know more about them, you can read optimize your website for mobile devices.

4. HTML5 and CSS3

Very true that there still exist corporate networks and users using some very old browsers. But one must know that the latest versions of the major web browsers — Internet Explorer, Firefox, Google Chrome Safari and Opera—they all support CSS3 and HTML5 features and elements strongly. Moreover, any latest Smartphone you will come across will support advanced CSS3, JavaScript and HTML5 features. Therefore, it’s quite beneficial for you if you start experimenting with HTML5 or CSS3 elements.

So, with such more upcoming new trends in the web designing field, you cannot lag behind; keep yourself updated with these trends and try implementing them as folks in the industry start adopting them.

About the Author: SEO-Semantic-XHTML, a specialized division of IPraxa, a full service web Agency, which offers PSD to HTML and Integration with software application, like PSD to wordpress, PSD to Drupal, PSD to Drupal and many more