10 Essential Things That Can Make A Fresh Website Design

Trying to make a website with a fresh web design? With each passing year, new trends emerge in the web design world. Some styles like flat design have become mainstream and a staple part the industry. However, many website owners still rely on time tested design templates to design their sites. If you're trying to break out of this box and want to create something that looks new and modern, here are 10 essential things that you need to implement.

1. Unique and Strong Typography

In the last two years, many website designs have focused on using unique typography to help establish their brand identity, increase readability and guide their readers through their website. Designers now have a larger selection of fonts to choose from, especially web font databases like Google Font. To help your website set itself apart, you want to use big typography, choose unique fonts that help differentiate your website and use fonts as visual cues (via colors, sizes and multiple styles). Just make sure that the font you use is supported by the major browsers.

2. Follow Modern Web Design Trends

More companies are opting to simplify their web design and create a sleeker look. If you want your website to appear fresh and updated, you want to follow the latest trends in web design. Some of the popular trends include minimalist, hero images, background videos, animations and flat design just to name a few. Some of these styles have been proven to work while others are quite new. The thing that binds them together is the fact that they all break away from what the average website is supposed to look like.

3. Use Fast Loading Responsive Design

By now, most companies that are in tune with what's going on are using responsive designs. Sadly, many responsive websites still suffer from slow loading speeds. There's no point in trying to impress your visitors with a fresh web design if you let them down with a poor experience. That's why you need to make sure that you optimize your responsive designs. Do more than just use responsive themes for your websites. Compress your images, use a content delivery network, use cleaner layouts, and preload the top of the fold elements to make the mobile browsing experience just as good as the desktop experience.

4. Use Minimal Design Elements

In web design today, less is more. Don't add more elements than your visitors need. For example, blogs of old would add things like calendars, intricate bios, badges and word tag clouds on their sidebars. In comparison, modern blogs keep it minimal with a subscription box, post/category navigation links and some ads for monetization. The idea here is to remove distractions to get users to focus on what's important. This is not saying to use a minimalist design but don't add anything more than you need to.

5. Integrate Real, High Quality Images

You've probably seen high quality images used in sites designed with hero images. But you need to do more than that to make your website look fresh and modern. If you're using photos, make sure you use high quality ones that really help your presentation make a strong impact. Avoid stock photos as they cheapen the look of your website. Many users are aware of how the average stock photo looks and are turned off by them. If you insist on using stock photos, choose ones that don't look like the typical stock photos. Custom animations and artwork can also work well but you need to avoid ones that look like cookie cutter templates.

6. Interactive Elements

A big trend in web design is the use of interactive elements. You'll notice that many websites are now using visual effects to keep the attention of their visitors. They're using transparency, graphics that fade out, sliding elements, mouseovers and interactive buttons that users can click. You may also want to use parallax design but that may not be ideal for all websites, especially ones that are looking to optimize for the search engines.

7. Revamp Your Navigation

There are many ways to make it easier for your visitors to use your website and find what they're looking for. By revamping your menu, you can add a lot of value to your visitors, especially if your website is content heavy. One idea that works well for mobile websites is the hamburger drop down menu. It allows users full access to the navigation menu with a single click. Another idea is to use top navigation menus that are sticky and follow users as they browse so that they don't have to scroll back up. A third idea is to break down long content by providing a sticky small in-content menu on the left hand side.

8. Strong Use of Colors

It's awesome that more designers are breaking out of boring neutral colors (black, red, blue) and using a larger variety of colors. Even strong colors like violet, yellow and orange can work well with the right balance. Designers are using wide color gradients and monochromatic color schemes to achieve this balance. The only time the line should be drawn is when the color is just too bright on the screen. It becomes too distracting, even annoying to the user.

9. Focus on UI and UX

Providing an outstanding user experience is what will ultimately make the user feel at home with your website and design. Using design elements like graphical cues, strong typography, and relevant icons can all improve the user experience. As mentioned earlier, improving the UI like the navigation is a big part of making this happen. Just remember that the UI is more than the navigation menu. It can also involve your site's search function, web applications and login interfaces as well.

10. Try Unique Layouts 

There are so many outstanding designs that incorporate a wide variety of layouts without inundating the user. For example, the top of the fold may use a standard hero image with a headline. But it may transition into a modular, card based or even infographic style layouts. Different layouts keep a website design fresh because it breaks away from the patterns that users are used to. Even content rich blog sites are using interchanging layouts to make sure that users don't develop blindness to the content as they browse the blog.

These essential things will help you make a website that's fresh, modern and unique. It's not vital that all these things are used in your website as every website has different needs and goals. But using good mix of them will help you come up with a design that stands apart from the masses and makes an impact with your audience.

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