As like any other technology, web designing trends have also changed largely over the. In the past year, we have seen a lot of new trends in website designs. As the users tend to keep on updating their mobile devices based on technological changes, the idea of providing them with the best user experience is also kept on improving.
With each round of upgrades, the developers and designers to provide the best user experience on a website, what had been the most trendy and cool up to that time become outdated and useless. You may see many articles over the internet discussing the latest trends and upcoming trends, but here in this article, we are trying to discuss a few such designs which may have become outdated by now for you to avoid it. Some of these which you have seen for long may even surprise you to see how these got outdated by now.
Sliders on The Pages With Meaningless CTAs
While thinking of web page elements, you have to keep these simple and to the point. The new-generation folks may not watch all of these anymore. So, such attempt will help create only white noise. Moreover, you may find them scrolling too fast oftentimes, and the users tend to miss the message also, which you wanted to highlight. A study has shown that hardly about 1% of the users only tend to click the sliders with a call to actions.
Usually, the things which go wrong with sliders are:
- Too much happening out there, or
- No clear CTAs included.
Experts say that even while the users are looking for specific content, they tend to fail in finding it out of a carousel, which is auto-forwarding.
Big Hero Images
A hero image is the one or series of images displayed on the homepage, which are typically large and featured. The prominence of such images makes them noticeable and called as hero images. Like many other unsustainable trends, this hero image display is also washed away with the trends.
You may now keep the hero images on the top screen, but not to cover the entire screen. The site owners also now want to make these sections compact. In fact, the designers love to have such imagery, but from the users’ point of view, hero images only help to push down valuable content further downward.
Usage of Stock Photos
You may have seen them in plenty, right? They were so obvious and were there on every other web page you see. It could be from the Unstock or iStockphoto, but designers tend to use them abundantly. However, once if you check the latest websites coming out from any NYC website design Company, you will see that the usage of such stock photos as minimal if not nil. In fact, there is no such expert advice as not to use stock photos, but customers like original photographs more than seeing the make-shift perfect stock photos. Web designers also must think of more unique photos which are realistic and meaningful than trying to match your ideas with the available stock.
Boring Flat Graphics
Flat design was introduced to counteract the design overload; however, it was meant to be used only sparingly. However, over time, flat design somehow became trendy and spread across the websites to fill pages. However, the major problem for the users with a flat design as if you couldn’t figure out the purpose of a button, then you are screwed. All the elements on the page blend together and give you no indication as to which of them are interactive. You can see how Microsoft took it to the extreme with their Windows 8 Metro.
Then Google established another approach known as material design. This was a more innovative concept which incorporates a 3D web interfaces which contain light, shadows, and material. As mobile technology-enabled touch screens to have 3-D interaction with web elements, effective usage of colors, thickness, and shadows gave the web designers more scope for providing better UI/UX. The concept of accessible design now lets the users better understand, navigate, and use the user interface for quick information gathering.
Hamburger Menu
No doubt that mobile-first design is essential, but it is best to keep the mobile designs specifically to mobile devices. There are still a lot of users browsing the internet over their laptop and desktop, and they don’t want to see these confusing stacks on their screen. If someone cannot find the menu as you have hidden it behind the hamburger, they may easily get frustrated with this mystery navigation experience.
On the other hand, even for the mobile devices, now designers prefer to put the word Menu in order to make it clear what this portion says and when to touch it. People may tend to find and use it as the screen space is limited on the mobile devices, but when it comes to desktop users, you have to follow a noticeable and easy to access arrangement of the Menu.
Images Replacing Text
Previously, when the internet speed was much slower compared to what we enjoy now, the websites used to take a lot of time to get loaded. Some who were rich in content kept the users till eternity to get loaded. So, in order to save space and decrease loading time, the developers used to avoid using custom fonts to save the crucial seconds to increase page loading speed. This further led to the practice of using text within images to give an additional design flair to important text and also ensuring faster loading.
However, this was a great strategy of slower times, but not anymore. Now, smartphones are the mainstream devices to access the internet, and the text in the imaging technique has many shortfalls at the present times. For the modern-day web designers, trying in web designing normal text with the custom font is the most beneficial approach to try.
Some other major reasons why the text is preferred over images are:
- SEO becomes more critical for website and text is what you can better rank for.
- Traffic through mobile devices now surpasses desktop traffic.
- User-friendly CMS now allows website developers to easily rewrite the website copy at a click of a button.
Along with the above, some other outdated web designing techniques are the usage of pop-ups, using sidebars for content, boring, stale typography, etc. With VR headsets and smartwatches are evolving, the concept of responsive design also keeps on changing over time.