With 2014 rapidly drawing to a close, some of the best website design companies and Internet marketing experts in the world are releasing their predictions for what the top web designs will look like in 2015. If you don’t have time to read all their reports, we’ve got you covered: Here are the three top web design trends for next year.
- Responsive Designs
With more and more people accessing the Internet on their smartphones and tablets — more, according to some studies, than are accessing the Internet via desktops — it’s become absolutely vital to create website designs with mobile in mind. No one on a smartphone wants to constantly zoom in and out to make content readable, or move frames left and right to find what they need. Responsive designs meet these needs by allowing web developers to make one site that recognizes the type of device accessing it and then reconfigures itself according to whether the user is on a desktop, tablet or smartphone.
- Infinite Scroll
These sites became popular in the last year, and they’re only getting better. Of course, these sites don’t really scroll down forever, but they join together frames that in an earlier age would have been entirely different pages reached by links. In general, a preference for scrolling over clicking is driven by mobile usability factors, but designers will continue to find ways to make these scrolling sites more attractive and convenient for desktop users, as well. While some sites use what’s called parallax scrolling, in which a background layer scrolls at a different rate than the foreground layer, simple flat designs will dominate next year’s designs.
- Big Background Photos
Small, embedded photos are out. Instead, large background images will take their place. These images may have text or buttons (look out for more and more “ghost buttons” in the coming months) placed over them — just ensure that everything is still readable. Background videos may also become more prominent, those these don’t lend themselves to superimposed text as easily.
What do you think will be the top web design trends next year? Join the discussion in the comments.