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The wealth of newness that the digital world has brought to our lives can never be understated. Beauty and thoughtfulness pay: as more and more potential users make their way through a jungle of website designs in just milliseconds, we are recently learning that a whopping ninety-four per cent –yup, that’s’ 94%, fellahs– reject or mistrust a website exclusively based on design principles. But this beauty and thoughtfulness factor is not just in the lines, the colors, the designs. It is also in the choices we make pertinent to the look & feel that we may not be so aware of, like content development or presentation formats. 

Here are a few helpful hints to keep you rocking in the website universe looking ahead to 2020.  Look out for and invest in:  

• Boldness & Simplicity.

  Complex, busy layouts may never have been the right path to tread… but averting them is now a mandate. Saturation is a big no-no, unless we’re speaking of bold colors, which as you have probably observed by now are a big hit. Brilliant, shiny, deep block ‘n bold colors are enticing crowd-pullers. They may also help modulate the message. In-Plane Switching (IPS) technology has been a boon in this regard, making bold colors stand out prominently and elegantly, often upping the joy factor of the visiting crowd. Boldness is also pertinent to eye-catching imagery that looks crisp and lures us in.  

• Dynamic Animations & Illustrations.

  Video stunned image in the last few years. But as we are experiencing ourselves, slow intros to a site from a bad connection or a badly made online video insertion can slow down the page load to the point where potential users start flocking elsewhere. So now, it’s animation that has taken over because it takes much less time and power to load: integrated GIFs, motion graphics, page transitioning, parallax scrolling, mouseover effects, etc. Joy, fun, spunk, you name it, it’s what this new package brings. 

• Anything Flash is doomed.

  Adobe Flash was so much the platform that helped bring web browser video and animation to the denizens. But no more! Companies and users began regretting its bugsome nature, fearing the security vulnerabilities that kept popping up, and dreading its frequent updates. Adobe is working with top clients to kill Flash, phasing it out by the end of 2020. Google Chrome has brought it one step closer: it will not recognize or ignore any flash content starting… well, now, by the end of this year. If you have anything based on Flash technology, the recommendation is simple: transition it to the friendlier HTML 5, supported and favored by all major platforms and browsers.  

• New, Exciting Platforms.

  Tik Tok up and boomed in early 2019 and it has just kept growing from there. Having become the social media of the moment, it seems like everyone is watching, downloading and uploading these Really Short Videos. It has now surpassed Instagram as the highest-growing image-based app, with a grand total of 663 million new downloads versus Instagram’s 444 million. The question is, how will users respond to as now that the Chinese-operated brand is looking to monetize? We’ll be closely expectant. LinkedIn Live is a live video broadcast service that debuted in beta format sometime in February of 2019, although its first native video content dates back to the summer of 2017. As a late bloomer to video use, when compared with its social peers, it has managed to work out some glitches and flaws and has seen its popularity rise like froth. Video is the fastest growing format in this renowned social business community and Live is the most sought-after feature.

• White Spacing.

  This is so simple, yet so unappreciated. Allow your website –heck, any document or format or platform where you will be inserting content– to BREATHE. Text overcrowding, that is, too much text, is a massive fail. Even worse, opting for a font that is too small to fit it all in, instead of working hard at your summarizing and overviewing skills. Making your website look like it’s all small print will make people do just what you think they will do… forget to read it or even pay attention to it, like a gruesome contract. Navigation aids, exciting vs. boring web design, better search indexes, asymmetric layouts, loud typography, CSS grids, scalable vector graphics, hand or child-like drawings, voice input interfaces, AI, machine learning and augmented reality infused websites, brutalism design… the list is long, but filled with allure and cues. For further data, or just plain inspiration, just access a host of online websites speaking of these trends and future success stories. Our personal favorite is searchengineland.com, where you can find anything SEM, SEO, social, retail, local and mobile content and events explained simply and enticingly.