At the beginning of the year it’s always a good time to have a clean out and shed the mountain of useless rubbish you may have accumulated over the previous 12 month period. It can also be a great time to give your website a fresh coat of paint it has been crying out for since 1997.

apple.com 1997

apple.com 2012

Looks aren’t everything I hear you cry, but having a website that is modern and professional in design can help maintain user attention for longer which, will help push your site up the search engine highway.

Ask yourself this when you next visit a website that you may be making a purchase from. Do you trust that company with your credit card details? What worked 10 years ago may not be working for your site today. Modern browsers are smarter and include features which are waiting to be used. Below is a list of some of the latest trends which will be making a big impact in 2012.

Bright and Colourful is Key:

Neutral colours are great for subtle design elements but bright hues of color can really grab a user attention and make a call to action stand out on your site. It can be difficult when selecting the right colours for a website but the general rule of thumb is to keep with no more than three main colours. It is also important that the colours on your website match your current branding otherwise it can make a logo stick out like a sore thumb.

Typography:

Font style is a vital ingredient with any design. They can help to change the meaning and tone of a sentence. It can be a struggle for any web designer when selecting fonts to use on a new design. Generally we are limited to web safe fonts which can be very generic and lacking in character (pardon the pun!). Luckily there are some ways to get around this. There are many free font archives available which offer a wide range of free font styles. Google offers its own version of web fonts which you can download and use in your new design http://www.google.com/webfonts.

Bigger text is better and if you want to get a message across it is always good to increase the font size. There are many good reasons why increasing your font size can make a big impact on the usability of your website. For example at the age of 40, only half the light gets through to the retina as it did at the age of 20.  The following article has put forward a good argument for increasing the size of the body text on a website which I hope will have a big impact in the New Year http://tiny.cc/4f4kh

CSS3 + HTML5

These two have been around for a couple of years now but with the legacy that is Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 6 still on its death rattle it’s been hard for these new features to be used during the building stage of a website. It is said that CSS3 and HTML5 will be big this year and there is plenty of reason why it will be great move in the right direction.

There are many options available including box shadows, animated buttons, multiple backgrounds, rounded corners and transparent images. All these can help to create amazing new website layouts.

Responsive Web Design

Responsive web design refers to the development of a website which changes the contents layout depending upon the size of the screen the user is viewing the site on. Why would this be important to me you may ask yourself. Have you recently viewed a website on a mobile device or tablet? Some sites which are not designed for mobile devices can offer a poor user experience and in some cases will not work at all.  Mobile devices currently hold around a 7 percent share of web traffic, which is set to increase by 17 percent in 2012. This, in turn, will only further increase as we enter faster mobile broadband territory. These are potential users which may not be getting the experience you wish them to have from your current site.

For more information:

http://inspirationfeed.com/articles/design-articles/web-graphic-design-trends-in-2012/

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/05/more-guidance-on-building-high-quality.html

http://designmodo.com/responsive-design-examples/

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-20118380-94/mobile-devices-driving-nearly-7-percent-of-web-traffic/

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