Right from the evolution of websites, website designs have been changing from time to time according to Trends and likes of the users of that time. Website design firms have also been updating themselves with UI design trends to deliver these modern websites to companies. 

As the famous quote goes,

"EVEN IF YOU ARE ON THE RIGHT TRACK, YOU WILL GET RUN OVER IF YOU SIT THERE" - WILL ROGERS.

This means that it is ineluctable to update yourself with current trends and implement them in order to sustain the tough competition. 

Website design trends are significant in helping us understand the flow of web designs over the time. If you want the coolest website in the market that is loved by the present-day users, then you need to stay newfangled. To keep you updated with the latest trends in web design for small Business, we've put together a solid list of the top web design trends in 2017. 

Why is web design and trends important?

Web designs are the reflection of your product. It gives the first impression to the user about your business. It affects conversion, search engine ranking, and brand awareness all of which have a massive impact on your ROI.

When it comes to web design development, there are new trends introduced every year of which some are short-lived and subsequently fail to produce the results required to move the small business ahead.

Conversely, there are many of the developing trends that are here to stay and are the stepping stones for a business to move forward.  

Types of design trends

1. Visual Trends

These are the trends based on how the visual of the website would be, ranging from images, animations, colors, graphics etc. 

Your audience will get the instant connection to your website if they see images that seems interesting to them or the ones they can relate to.

Large images are again a part of visual trend that has been preferred by the masses.

Animating your CTA's indicates your user to click on what action you want them to do. Overdoing it will eventually distract the user leading to the adverse.

2. Functional Design Trends

In order to see your web design, the users have to wait for the page to load. A user waits for a maximum of 3 seconds for a page to load or leaves the page immediately. Loading skeleton screens helps the users anticipate what they are going to see and reduces cognitive load. Skeleton screens lets your users start engaging in your content right away.

Using bots to answer customer queries are also part of functional design trends. 

3. Strategic Design Trends

Strategic design lets you not see a website as design alone. It is designing a website to help you accomplish your organization's goals and succeed against competitors.

Strategical design trends focus on keeping popup's and other distractions at bay from the CTA's and products.

Adding a persuasive video or a large image might do the trick of highlighting and putting forth the features and utility of your product.

Videos have been added along with pictures by a lot of ecommerce sites to provide a real time experience to the users. .

Top design trends (general)

Not all trends are a hit. There are some designs that might not have worked out well with the users. So here we have curated the top web design trends that are good website design examples.

1. Contact form

This is highly important for any website that intends to generate leads. An easy to find contact form helps you to get the leads. Include the contact form on every page to make it better for the user to find it. A study says that once on a company's homepage, 64% of visitors want to see the company's contact information. IT is essential for you to include a contact form in your website as stats say that 44% of website visitors will leave a company's website if there's no contact information or phone number.

2. Permanent CTA

Frequent Popups may seem annoying to the user as it disturbs the user while reading the website's content. Placing a prominent big button on the top right corner of the screen all the time will serve the purpose without distracting the user. Ensure that the call to action button floats on the top right corner of the screen even while the page is scrolled in order to emphasize the CTA to the visitors and prevent them from searching for it.

3. Including Trust Badges:

• Customer trust is important to any business. One of the best ways to build customer trust is by publishing customer testimonials, rating and reviews in the business website. These shave to be showcased prominently on your site. Adding the photos of the customers along with the reviews adds even more credibility to their opinion about your product or service.
• Certifications and acknowledgements earned by your business can also be displayed in the form of prominent badges in the website.

4. Adding Cinemagraphs

• Adding Cinemagraphs will give a live explanation of your product that is equal to look and feel. cinemagraphs are something like gif's that looks like a video to us. 
• Websites prefer using Cinemagraphs as they are cool and eye catching. I would expect more companies to try this because they are not very difficult to produce and are a newer way to grab attention.

Adding Cinemagraphs - Source: Tripwiremagazine.com

5. Card Design 

• Card design which was seen in pinterest earlier have been adopted by many websites like google, apple etc for its clarity organized content.
• Card design grew its popularity since it is responsive in nature. They adjust themselves to display properly on all devices (computers , tablets and mobile phones). Card design is easy to load and its clear separation of contents help users focuses on the content without distractions.
• This is the reason why a lot of ecommerce sites have chosen card layout to display their products. You can also develop one such site with the help of a responsive web design company.

Card Design

Landing Page Web Design Trends

Landing page trends are important to a business to convert leads. A study says that 78% of businesses that had poorly designed Landing pages failed to attract customers.

How many times have you left a webpage seeing that the landing page of a website doesn't convey your queries regarding the product? Stats say that a simple landing page with nothing much to say has 70-90% bounce rates.

So here are the recent landing page designs that will reduce bounce rates in your page.

Simple and clean layout

There is a tendency for the businesses to showcase all the features of the product in the landing page itself. This leads to cluttering in the landing page that will do the worse. Keep things simple and easy for the visitors to avoid clouding of thoughts. 

You can keep a simple yet attractive landing page encouraging the viewers to scroll and read further to see more about your product.

A study by ClickTale says that 91% of page views occurred on pages with a scroll bar so you can be rest assured that people will scroll further on your website if they find the landing page convincing.

Simple and clean layout 

Live Chat:

You can implement live chat in the landing page to engage your user and answer their questions on time.

Avoid chat window that pops up to distract the user from reading your website contents. Keep it simple.

Prominent CTA's

Call-to-action buttons are the key tools that help you convert visitors to potential customers. Only if these buttons are prominent, the visitors will take action on them. No user will search for the buttons for long, as a business it is your prerequisite to reach out to your customers. You can accomplish this by placing your CTA's as a large image with colour contrast and should be visible even if the user scrolls or navigates to other pages.

Crisp Headlines

The trends of adding difficult to interpret tag lines have gone now and businesses have started adopting simple and clear headlines for their website. These obvious headlines convey the purpose of the website crisply to the audience.

Think from the audience perspective and give a crisp headline to the landing page that answers the audience question.

Crisp Headlines 

Contact us design trends

We earlier discussed the importance of a contact form in a website, 44% of website visitors will abandon a website if there's no contact information displayed. Here are some Best looking examples for your contact us page.

Add detailed location

Add the contact details of all the branches your business has along with addresses, phone numbers, and links to a map. This will build user credibility to your site and support them to reach you according to their location.

Add detailed location - Source: Designschool.canva.com

Include Opening Hours

If your business doesn't have a 24*7 customer support, let them know that. It is always safe to include the working hours in the website so that the customer will be saved from the hassle of calling you repeatedly and not getting any answer. This will lead to an annoyed customer.

Highlight key information

You can make the text in the Contact Us page bold and dynamic. Specifying the important information like location, address, and email in a colour that is contrasting with the font and background will highlight essential information thereby saving time.

Keep it simple

A lot of customers would prefer to use a contact form because it saves time. IT saves them from the trouble of opening their e-mail client and drafting a message to get in touch with you. Minimizing their effort by keeping a simple contact form with necessary fields will get you the brownie points

Keep it simple

Thank you page design trends

Thank you pages are the pages that thank your customer after he completes a desired action in your website like subscribing or purchasing. It helps you as a company to build a connection with your customer.

It's your next opportunity to encourage the lead down the sales funnel.  

Offer a coupon/discount

Offering coupons is a popular tactic for many businesses. But overdoing it will lead to a loss. You can use discount coupons or discounts to lure customers to subscribe or sign up to your website or may be use it on the first purchase. You can also offer a sample of your bestseller product for their next purchase.

Carry out a survey

Conduct a survey to know your customer better and his opinion regarding the product. This will give your more insights to develop your business.

Display top content

Display the top popular posts in your thank you page. This will promote user engagement in your website.

Display top content - Source: Sleeknote.com

CTA design trends

Contrast Colour

Adding a CTA with contrast colour draws user focus to it and makes your CTA stand alone amongst the crowd. Prominent CTA's are the lead converters and hence if given in contrast colour will draw the user attention to it.

Contrast Colour

Large Text and Buttons

Varying text size and graphics will give a nice appeal to the users. If all other elements on the page are a similar size with one large button then it will stand out amongst the crowd.

Large Text and Buttons

Conclusion:

Follow these trends to implement the best website design in your page. You can also outsource it to Top web designing companies who specialize in web design and development services to build a modern website that is up to date with the trends. Web designing companies in Middle East.