Dying Website Design Trends

As the digital marketing age becomes more prominent and technology continues to evolve (and explode), it’s only natural for website design to change and evolve as well. It’s pretty standard for design styles to change every 4-5 years, but how they change is much more directly impacted now by mobile devices and usability. It’s a good rule of thumb to redesign a company website at least every 4-5 years, and here are some of the web trends that should NOT be applied any longer…

1. Complicated Designs – Gone are the days of complex designs with multiple elements on every page and different looks for several pages. We are now at the point where less is more. Clean and simple rules the design world. A website needs to have some style and look professional, but simplicity and ease of usability are now the driving factors.
2. Mobile Versions – A few years ago when smartphones burst onto the scene, it was popular to create a separate mobile website. That has been phasing out the last two years for two reasons – new websites are simpler in design and easier to navigate, and “responsive” technology has improved that transfers/resizes most elements of a website automatically so it appears nearly identical on all devices. Unless a website requires intense action and ordering such as a restaurant or retail site, separate mobile websites are no longer necessary.
3. Text-heavy Sites – Nobody likes to read anymore, plain and simple. We’re a more fast-paced society than ever, with shorter attention spans than ever. Loading a website with multiple paragraphs on every page will overwhelm and annoy the reader. Text should be kept short and succinct; bullet points, call-out boxes and graphics are much more effective forms of communication for a website design these days.
4. Multi-level Clicking – Websites have become very flat now, which means more buttons on the home page navigation menu and less secondary and tertiary pages. As mentioned above, attention spans are short and people are too busy to fish through a bunch of clickable links and buttons. If a viewer needs to click more than twice, you’ve lost them.
5. 3D Design – Creative 3D animation is still evolving and becoming more commonplace, but 3D design in the form of drop shadows and gradients are no longer effective. The 90’s look of multi-lined fonts and shadows are too visually heavy and distracting for today’s simplistic website designs. This has the same effect as the multi-level clicking, the less 3D design that appears on the site, the easier it is to read and longer viewers will stay on it.
6. Flash – I put this one last because it really shouldn’t even be in the conversation anymore. Flash programming was on its way out 4-5 years ago. It’s an older, clunky form of animated coding, it takes longer for pages to load and it blocks Google robots and nullifies SEO. HTML 5 is the new standard for animation and videos on websites and there are many new widgets and plugins that employ a much simpler and cleaner method than Flash. Any existing websites coded entirely in Flash should be redesigned ASAP.

In general new websites and design trends should have a minimalist approach. A website is your ultimate sales tool but the design should not overwhelm and confuse the viewer, but provide an easy means for them to learn the main points about your company with prompts to make contact and/or purchase products & services.