Website Redesign - Reason 3 Design Trends

Remember bell bottom jeans? Platform shoes? Leisure suits? All good examples of apparel design trends that have come and gone. Website design trends go through similar changes. In years past we’ve used blinking text, Flash animations and beveled buttons (and logos, and pictures, and…. Well you name it someone put a bevel on it).

Today you’ll find an absence of all of these at one time “current” design trends. Instead you will see very “flat design” without all those bevels and shadows. Where we once used tiny images because screen resolutions were smaller and that dial-up modem just couldn’t load those big images. Now we use multiple full screen images that contribute greatly to a beautiful and content rich website. Where today we use video regularly on a website, years ago that was an unthinkable choice. And with so many site visitors using their smartphone to hit the site, responsive web design is a must.



Even the practice of how a website was coded or programmed has changed greatly. Where years ago it was straight HTML and any instructions on how the website should look were embedded right in the .html file, today we typically only use the .html file to hold references to .css (Cascading Style Sheets) and .js (JavaScript) files that define how items on the screen look and how they interact with the site visitor. Years ago, to change a web page meant opening that same .html file and editing away. Today, log in with your username and password and work in an easy to use WYSIWIG (What You See Is What You Get) environment. Want to preview those changes before it goes live? Just push the preview button, that sure beats the old trial and error. Sites are database driven, meaning the text content and references to images, videos, even the hyperlinks to other pages or websites are all stored in a database allowing for easy updates to both the content and the look of the website as the two are very independent of each other.

These changes to the website design and development process, especially the advancement of using css and frameworks like bootstrap to layout the screen based on the screen resolution of the device being used have both contributed to where we are today with our design trends.

Improved capabilities in CSS mean borders, gradients, and color schemes can be much more creative and richer in design. Shoot, I still remember designing for a screen that only supported 256 colors! We actually had a “web safe” palette that we worked with knowing that not everyone had the ability to display 16.7 million colors on the screen (256 values of Red, Green, and Blue).

Now, take a look at your website. Does it look like it was designed in the bell bottom era? Does it fill the screen? Look great on both large desktop monitors and phones? Does it take advantage of the higher bandwidth we have available, even on phones, to include beautiful high-resolution images and videos? Is it time to bring your website up to current standards and give it a new look? Contact us today for a fresh new website design, plus take advantage of our SEO skills to get it higher ranked on Google at the same time.

Next up in our Why Redesign Your Website Series - Changes in technology which will discuss Content Management Systems and the capabilities you’ll have as the website owner in managing your website yourself, 24/7/365.