Five Popular Web Design Trends for 2022
Like clothing styles and musical tastes, web design is always evolving. If you’re in the early stages of planning a web redesign, or if you’re building a new website in the coming year, you’re probably wondering what’s just over the horizon. These trends and ideas can give you a great starting point before you contact EP Host for professional web design in San Diego.
1: Simplicity Rules
We could have written this at any point in the last few years, but there’s one web design trend that’s proven as reliable as a pair of broken-in jeans: minimalism. While some designers are going all in on animations, GIFs, and motion graphics of other types, we recognize that many web users are growing tired of the countless flyouts, pop ups, and other visual clutter found on many websites. Going basic with clean designs, simple navigation, and minimal distraction will be popular with your clients, and it’s easier to optimize across multiple devices and browsers besides.
2: Going Dark
Dark mode is becoming increasingly popular, with many operating systems and browsers building in this type of functionality. This trend comes with its share of advantages. It gels nicely with a minimalist esthetic and lets some colors pop in a way they wouldn’t against a brighter background. It’s easier on the eyes than a brighter theme. And dark designs are friendlier to OLED screens, prolonging their lifespans and conserving device power.
3 / 4: Humanizing the Web Experience
This broader trend is particularly welcome to any of us who’ve felt like our web experience had been focus-grouped, automated, and optimized half to death. It’s an umbrella of sorts for two trends we’re keeping an eye on.
Embracing Imperfection
Minimalism doesn’t need to be, and shouldn’t be, dull. Your website is a key part of your brand, and a design that’s anodyne and anonymous, with all the rough edges smoothed out, isn’t telling your story. A little wabi-sabi goes a long way; imperfections in photos, use of hand-drawn fonts, illustrations that are a bit rough around the edges, or even a judiciously-placed typo can speak to your followers in a way that perfection simply wouldn’t.
Semantic Search Meets Voice Search
Voice user interfaces seem to be everywhere. We spend nearly as much time asking our smart devices, phones, and home assistants questions as we do talking to our coworkers. That’s changing how we search, and it’s also changing search engine optimization itself. Semantic search, already a growing part of Google and other search engines’ algorithms, is getting smarter, and it’s also being given more weight in SEO terms. That’s actually good news, since it encourages a conversational tone rather than the stilted style you usually see when someone’s trying to match a search phrase in their content. After all, a hungry browser is more likely to say “Hey, Siri, find me some Chinese takeout,” and not, “Alexa, Chinese restaurant near me delivery.”
5: Fundamentals Still Matter
If there’s another “trend” that’s a safe bet, it’s this: you won’t get very far if you neglect the fundamentals. A clean design is underpinned by uncluttered HTML and CSS. Good UX helps reinforce good SEO. And all the changes — the growing importance of data security, GDPR compliance concerns, chatbots, VR and AR experiences, and custom app development among them — will place high demands on system resources. That calls for flexible and robust hosting to ensure constant uptime for an ecosystem that’s always primed to deliver its best.
Whether you’re a new business that’s taking its first tentative steps online, or an established enterprise that needs web design solutions in San Diego, you’ll find the knowledge, tools, and help you need with EP Host.