Keeping your website looking fresh and attractive is crucial in today’s crowded online marketplace. If you’re thinking about sprucing up your web presence, take some inspiration from these emerging web design trends currently gaining attention. 2022 is a great year to consider trying:
- Action distraction: Looking to lower your bounce rates? Waiting for pages to load often kills any interest a user might have in your site and your business. Get around the issue by keeping things moving and distract the user from the wait with a staged page load, also know as a skeleton screen. Gradual page loading piques curiosity and lets your viewer know something interesting is about to happen. The sense of progress keeps people engaged.
- Lots of bots: Provide interactive, on-page customer service or lead nurturing with a chatty bot. This method of personalization and proactive interaction is becoming easier to implement and customize to the needs of your particular industry and user base.
- Cart smarts: Up-sell during the checkout process. This classic and successful real-world sales tactic works just as well online. During the checkout process, you’ve got a captive audience that’s already engaged and active. Provided you don’t delay the checkout too much with your up-sell and your recommendations are relevant, you can easily rack up more sales with this strategy.
- Active CTAs: Animate your calls to action to encourage and earn a click. However, you should always use subtlety and restraint so that your CTA doesn’t veer from helpful into annoyance territory. Don’t emulate those eternally hopping app icons that “helpfully” remind you to update.
- Altruistic overlays: Those “wait, don’t go” overlays can be irritating, so this year try using them differently. Provide an offer that requires nothing from the user in return—like a spur-of-the-moment discount coupon—with no requirement to enter an email address.
- Right-at-home home pages: Make your website visitors feel completely at home, so that they know they’re in the right place. Create unique, targeted versions of your home page; kind of a home page/landing page hybrid. Serve up content keyed to the interests of the specific visitor’s demographic. You can also address each user more directly and personally by using cues from the referring webpage, ad or social media campaign.
- Type, emphasized: Interesting typography is making a comeback. Custom fonts and type-based logos are gaining interest again. Video still captures the most attention on a given web page, but type is having an impact in this media format as well. Key phrases from video are lately appearing over appropriate frames, for those who want the story without sound or are impatient with the video. And, of course, the still-popular product explainer videos utilize text to present content engagingly and memorably.
- Commissioned illustrations: As another antidote to video content overload (and generic-looking stock photos), illustrations unique to your website can bring ideas, and page text, to life for users.
- Embrace scrolling: Single page, vertical websites are an excellent way to enable storytelling (a popular and effective content type). You can more easily control the narrative, with little clicking around by the user to interrupt the flow of your brand’s story.
- Minimalist web design: Clearing away visual clutter from your web pages brings stress relief and clarity, like visiting a calm and organized home. An uncomplicated, yet well-crafted site design (one with clean lines) shows sophistication and allows you to focus the user on your core product or service.
Wondering which of these current web design trends might take your conversions to the next level—and how to implement them on your website? We’re here to help! Contact us at Self Image Media for a website upgrade or redesign consultation today.
