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It’s a new year—thinking of starting fresh with an updated website? This year, the biggest trend in website redesign is all about keeping things as minimalist as possible.
Flat design
Web designers can thank Apple for this emergence of simplified design. Always the trendsetter, Apple popularized “flat design”—design free of frills like drop shadows and gradients—with the introduction of iOS 7, and companies using professional web design have taken note. Flat design may look plain at first, but embrace it—users don’t want to be overwhelmed by text or photos when every single one tries to catch their eye.
Simple color schemes
When it comes to your website redesign in 2014, you’ll want to avoid using every color of the rainbow. Instead, choose one or two key colors that best represent your business—these colors will most likely come from your business’s logo. The colors can be accented by black or white, but be cautious of color overload.
Single photos
Remember when Pinterest really became big and many websites started using tile-style to display their photos and content? That’s a thing of the past this year. The single-photo model began to pick up toward the end of last year, and it will only continue to grow in 2014.
Choose a clean, high-resolution photo as a landing page. Or, if you’d rather showcase your company’s design chops, create an interesting graphic that almost pops off the page—in a good way.
No sliders on home pages
Since single photos are being more commonly used, it only makes sense that sliders are rapidly disappearing. Sliders grew to popularity on news sites for displaying multiple stories a few years ago. Now, though, they just make a site look clunky and outdated.
For professional web design, replace the slider with one of the previously mentioned single-photo (or graphic) landing pages.
Infinite scrolling
Going along with the single-page model, look to see more business gravitating toward an endless scrolling option. With infinite scroll, web pages seem much cleaner and user-friendly. Plus, with pages set up in endless scroll, it draws more attention to each one, rather than forcing visitors to click on every page.
An infinite scroll option also makes users more likely to read pages.
