Its a new year, a new decade, and if youre still staring at your same
old, stale website, you may want to add a new resolution; update your
website. Before looking for new web design in the Philadelphia area,
you may want to review trends in web design, and to consider some
predictions about what will last so that you can invest without spending
a fortune over and over again.
Of course web design is somewhat like fashion, trendy and beautiful in
the eyes of the designer. However there are a few classic design trends
that I believe will continue throughout 2010 and beyond.
Content Management Systems these types of websites can actually save
you money on maintenance. Open source CMS systems like Wordpress,
Joomla, and Drupal have matured into wonderful website template
architectures with purely customizable themes. You no longer have to
make a trade off between boxy, ridged design versus the ability to edit
and create your own pages if you dont know a program language. These
architectures also make use of CSS (cascading style sheets) and very
search engine friendly structures, which is an added bonus. Many
developers prefer using these CMS systems because it makes programming
quicker and easier.
Social Applications – I dont think the social networks like LinkedIn,
Facebook and Twitter are going to go away, so websites will have to
begin interacting more with them, and include more social aspects like
events, comments, ratings, forums, and interactivity. This means that
developers will be using more 3rd party libraries which use AJAX like
mootools, jquery and prototype for interactive buttons, and frameworks
like zend, cakephp, and symfony to handle the complex interactivity
between applications.
Mobile phones make sure your website works well on most mobile
devices, especially the iPhone and Blackberry. Also make sure your
website and blog are connected to your Facebook and LinkedIn pages.
There are about 22.4 million internet phone users searching the web for
news and information. According to ComScore the number of users has
doubled from last year. ComScore also says that more than 9 million
users are accessing social sites from their mobile devices this
includes blogs and social networks. While you are designing that new
website for 2010, make sure you consider that your visitors may be
searching for you and researching you while they are on the move, not
just when they are in front of their office or home computers.
The Look of the website a website is sort of like a car or a
kitchen. You can almost tell what year it was designed by the colors,
fonts, and general layout. The trends for 2010 include design aspects
borrowed from print. This includes a design grid type style with lots
of white space, large type (for increasingly aging users), mixing
illustrations and textures with actual photos and videos, colorful
designs, and a clear navigation path. Less seems to be more in website
design this year. Greens and earth tones also seem to be popular as
people seek more ecological and organic looking websites. Even logos
seem to be trending away from glossy designs to textured, organic
designs.
Fonts using sIFR - Scalable Inman Flash Replacement has been around for
a couple of years, but designers are just starting to really make use of
it by creating customized titles using JavaScript, Flash, and CSS.
Instead of creating cool looking fonts for titles with images, sIFR can
dynamically create text using whatever font you want. The search
engines and visitors with non-Flash browsers can also still read the
text (but of course it wont look beautiful to them).
Photo and Video A trend with faster internet connections is the
ability to show video and photos of real people, rather than scaled down
graphics which load faster. In 2009 video was a big part of many sites,
and I see this trend continuing and increasing as the technology becomes
easier and easier to use.
Short pages Google Caffeine will probably shape the design trends in
2010 as developers quickly try to make sure that their sites continue to
rank in the new search algorithm. Some things we already know about
Caffeine are that website pages should be shorter and focused on a
single topic, and that current pages with fast load times will rank
higher in search results.
Web design in Philadelphia for 2010 will be a continuation of the trends
that started last year, with an emphasis on usability and interaction.
Since US web design jobs are predicted to grow by about 10% through
2016, and web development jobs are going to grow by about 30% in that
same time period, the trend toward more web design in Philadelphia seems
justified.
Read more on Web Design in Philadelphia for 2010…