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Top Website Design Trends for 2011
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Every year new trends emerge within the web design industry and staying on top of these trends and utilizing them in your own web designs can help to keep your website eye-catching and current. While having a beautiful web design is important, often these design trends have other benefits in terms of marketing. In today's post we've chosen out top website design trends for 2011 based on their popularity, their visual appeal and their ability to help your marketing initiatives.
So, without further ado, here are the trends:
HTML5 and CSS3. We're sure that some of you out there will debate whether this can be called a "trend" or a new emerging standard in web design, but the bottom line is that HTML5 and CSS3 are something to watch out for, and will only grow in popularity in 2011. If you don't know what they can do for you, then you may fall behind the curve. HTML5 and CSS3 make it simpler to build modern web elements into your web designs including smarter forms, beautiful typography and social tools like wikis and drag and drop functionality.
Using typography as a design element. Why is typography so important? Well it's one of the main ways that you communicate with your audience on your website. In the past getting rich typographic elements meant resorting to creating beautiful images that were neither search engine or website optimization friendly. Now, using tools like Typekit, web designers can find web-friendly fonts that can help you communicate with your audience in a visually appealing way, while still optimizing for search engine rankings.
Editorial-style layouts. Do you have a website with lots of frequently updated content? Then this type of website layout may be for you. By using a grid for the website's design layout, organizations can optimize the space on their website by leaving lots of areas for content. The more content that you have visible on your main pages, the more of it your visitors are going to find quickly and easily, not to mention the added benefit that fresh content has for your SEO strategy.
Minimalist layouts and color schemes. These are great for smaller organizations with less content for their website. Minimalist layouts take fewer resources to maintain and manage, they load faster (which is great for SEO) and can often be developed and implemented more quickly than larger, more complex designs. Many organizations are beginning to favor the clean, neat and easy-to-use navigation of these style layouts.
Large and interactive website headers. Making a good first impression for your website is essential for convincing your website visitors to stick around long enough to convert. Having a large website header where you feature important information like calls-to-action, latest promotions and offers can go along way towards convincing your visitors to convert.
Link-rich footers. This type of footer is an excellent example of website design supporting website usability. Having a website footer that is full of links makes it easier for your users to navigate while at the same time improving your SEO.
Mobile compatible websites. This is becoming less of a trend and more of a necessity for many organizations. So many internet users are choosing to access websites and online information through mobile devices that it's a very good idea for companies to make sure that they have a website that renders nicely for mobile.
Wider layouts. Make the most out of the space you have available to you! That's one of the biggest motivators behind having large website designs that are designed for larger screen resolutions, but still scale nicely for those (few) people who are still using smaller ones.
Full-image backgrounds. Do you want a website that immediately grabs your visitors' attention? Well having a beautiful image as your entire background is a good way to do that. These types of sites are growing in popularity, especially for organizations with portfolio-friendly work.We think sites like these can be especially effective for higher education institutions that often like to have image galleries showing their campus. Why not just make those images the background instead?
It's always important to remember when your designing or redesigning a website that your website is mean to support your overall business goals. That means that it needs to help you get found more easily, it needs to convince your visitors to convert and it needs to communicate your message effectively. No matter how beautiful your website is, if your design doesn't support those initiatives, then it's not worth the time or money it takes to create the design. Make sure that when you are thinking about a new website, you are using a firm that will design your website as part of your marketing strategy.
If you like this post, make sure that you take a look at our webinar on the same topic, "Top Website Design Trends for 2011."
Posted by Amberlie Denny at December 9, 2010 8:00 AM
Comments
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Very true for 2011 web trends. I think mobile sites will have to be in everyone's arsenal if they want to compete with the big sites out there. Especially for ecommerce.
Cool there is actually some good points on this post some of my friends might find this relevant, will send them a link, many thanks...
Hello,
Thank you for your nice article. I found something special on it.
Thanks
Great roundup of tips.
I don't see HTML5+CSS3 as a trend, well, at least if you want your users to feel the power of html5 and css3.
Unfortunately, thanks to the lack of compatibility with most internet explorer versions, you won't be able to dump html4/xhtml 1.1 and css2.
Same thing will apply to the wider websites.
The world is not ready for these 2 to be trends, in 2011. Any serious web designer (and I don't consider 1 myself), will need to do twice the job, to deliver html5 site (1 site for the firefox and webkit users, and 1 for trident users), and honestly, I not willing to do twice the job.
It's definitely true that there are still reasons why HTML5 and CSS3 aren't the best option for all organizations, and browser compatibility is one of them. We added HTML5 and CSS3 to the list as more of an "emerging trend" because we believe that we will see a wider adoption of it in 2011, and, considering the potential benefits of its adoption for many organizations, we felt that leaving it off the list would be ignoring a trend that many designers are taking interest in.
What about cufon font replacement? That gets my vote for 2011. I cant believe it didnt make the list. when you say wider, how wide are we talking. Almost everybody I know uses 960px. whats new?
When we were writing this post, the topic of Cufon and other flash replacements did come up, but we opted to leave them off the list mostly because many of them are quite widely used already and we didn't feel like they fit with the rest of our "trends." Having said that it certainly is an important point in web design, we've written about it and other replacement options before (http://www.marqui.com/blog/6-things-you-wanted-to-know-about-sifr-but-were-afraid-to-ask.aspx) and is especially important if people are taking the points we made about typography to heart! As far as the wider layout point goes, it's certainly true that 960 is a standard for website resolution. When we design websites here we usually stick between 960px and 996px, but the trends seem to be towards pushing layouts closer to 1000px (take a look at this video for more info, it's a little older but still relevant http://www.from-the-couch.com/post.cfm/title/are-we-ready-for-1000px-designs). In the RGA example above, their website is designed for those with larger resolutions but actually re-sizes to accommodate smaller ones. We tested the example out on our designer's 1920 X 1200 iMac, the website is 1470px, but on an average 1280 X 1024 screen it is 1220px.
Really like this ideas.
Well really good ideas for the web developer and really appreciate it. Thanks for sharing it.
All in all, its a good read. I love all the designs. Just seeing these kind of designs inspires me to do great with my own designs.
I really like your design's outputs. Great for a several certain niche.
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