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Like all things, Website Design sees its share of trends come and go. While in the world of fashion or other areas, it might not seem necessary to keep up with the trends, there are some very good reasons you should consider keeping your website's design fresh, modern, and current:

Shows that you are "relevant"

Let's face it, a website is a tool of advertising. In fact, it is one of the main ways a prospective client, customer, etc. will judge you before they even meet you! You know what they say about first impressions! If your site's design (let alone content) is outdated and old-fashioned, then that will reflect your business in the user's eyes.

Keeps Visitors Engaged

The longer a person is on your site, the greater the change they will be influenced to reach out and contact you, buy from you, etc. There is a reason why certain design trends are ""in style"" - that is what is engaging people at the present time! Keeping your site's design current with the trends will yield a more appealing user experience and better engagement!

Shows that you are professional

If a user goes to a site and it doesn't have a cohesive, clean, look to it, it just doesn't look professional. A design is meant to enhance the content, not distract from it. Furthermore, outside of the home page which might look slightly different, the other pages of the site should look fairly similar to show uniformity with the site. If every page looks different (different background/different colors/different fonts/etc.) then the site will not have a uniformed and professional look to the user.

Shows you have restraint

This is actually no small issue. It goes back Jeff Goldblum's line in Jurassic Park, ""You were so busy figuring out what you could do, no one ever stopped to ask if you should."" When it comes to digital media there is a lot you can do. The temptation is very real to throw in as many effects, colors, images, etc. at a screen to ""show off"" a bit (it reminds me of one of the PowerPoint abuses I often talk about - too many effects/animations in a slide/slideshow).

When you humble yourself to follow the current design trends you end up showing a bit of restraint. Instead of showing off everything you can put on a page, you limit yourself to a design and effects that are cohesive, highlight your content, and are not distracting.

What are current design trends?

In the past couple years websites have gone back to cleaner, simpler designs. This is a big shift from design standards of 2016-2019 that tended to focus more on bold designs with a lot of different effects/animations (in part this was due to some new web technologies that were coming out and ""Everyone wanted to have them on their site"". Sites also tended to be overstuffed with content/pages. It is actually for this reason that at the time of this writing we are redesigning our own site - making it more streamlined, cleaner, and simpler. Right now we live in a sound byte society. People want their information and they want it fast, clean and easily digestible (think of how well twitter does with such a small character limit). A lot of websites now have white content areas instead of a lot of images or video moving in the background (again, simpler design). While effects are still present on a site, they are not overwhelming, they are often subtle, and simple. Again, the stress in web design today is clean, simple, and straightforward.

We want to challenge you to look at the design of your site. If it is in need of a facelift, please contact us, we would love to help! Ideally, a website's design should be refreshed every 2-3 years!"