Web trends to beware of in 2016
Web design is an intrinsically trend-led arena. This means that some fads die out as quickly as they rose to prominence, while others take time to gain momentum but ultimately cause a permanent sea change in the way that sites are constructed.
Knowing which trends to follow and which to ignore is an art, so here are a few of 2016’s most potentially problematic fashions for web design that may or may not be appropriate for your site.
Homepage Image Carousels
Cycling carousels of images with minimal amounts of text overlaid on them can be found on a huge number of sites this year, although this ubiquity is unhelpful in a sense because it makes it harder for certain front pages to stand out from the litany of rivals that mimic its setup.
Another reason to discount carousels as a design principle is that they do not aid SEO, particularly now that meta keywords are no longer taken into consideration by Google.
Finally, the data-intensive nature of images is not ideal for serving visitors using mobile devices with slow wireless connections. With page load speed being targeted as desirable in a mobile search environment, using a carousel is a less-than-optimal approach.
Obfuscating Load Screens
Companies offering Hemel Hempstead web design services like http://www.24-7website.co.uk/web-design-hemel-hempstead/ will advise most clients that making visitors suffer through a load screen before they can click through to the content they actually want to access is a bad idea, yet many sites still follow this infuriating trend.
Load screens themselves are not necessarily a problem as long as they are simple, well presented and make it clear that visitors can quickly navigate to their destination page without being held up for too long. Avoid a design that is oversaturated with ads, lacking in interface elements or filled with elements based on performance-sapping platforms like Flash that might cause people to close the tab before even entering the site proper.
Superfluous Scrolling Effects
While the trend for infinite scrolling has simmered down from its peak, the current king of the hill is parallax scrolling, with fore and background page elements moving past one another at different speeds.
The negative performance hit, particularly on mobile devices, should be considered as problematic. As with all trends, however, some sites will make use of this effectively.
