Web Design is the most important factor for any website. It is the key to the website’s success. The design and the style can either make it or break it. Surprisingly, web design trends keep changing rapidly. Some of these trends end up becoming very popular. Everyone starts using popular web design trends to compete and keep up with the latest happenings.
According to reports, 88% of online consumers are not likely to revisit a website after a bad experience. Approximately75% of the consumers admitted that they analyze a company’s credibility based on its website design. This shows how important it is to choose an appropriate web design keeping aside the popularity of the trend. But the real question is, what do you do amidst all of this? Do you adopt the design, or do you ignore it and stick with what’s best for you? Let’s answer these questions below.
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Ignore It and Stick With What Works
The best option for you would be to stick to your ongoing design format. This suggestion evaluates and adopts if you fall into any one of the following categories.
Website Designing/ Short-Term Website Projects
Adopting new web design trends is not recommended if you are engaged in the website building business. Once you design the website, you hand it over to your clients. The design trends frequently change in the market.
The success of the trend is unpredictable. Suppose you adopt the latest trend in one of your projects and hand it over to the client. If the trend becomes outdated or the hype dies, the client would be left with outdated web design. This will further have an impact on your brand image. This is so because the customer is likely to do one of the following things.They will revert to you for rework, and this shows dissatisfaction with the customer’s part.
- They might approach another company to rebuild the website. This will have a bad impact on your business.
Designing Website for a Well-Known Company
If you are designing or revamping an established company’s website, it is risky to try the latest design trend. You will have to carefully analyze the aftermath of applying the latest trend. It is best to maintain the ongoing design the company uses. If the company is well-reputed and has a certain brand value, the best thing is to maintain consistency. But this does not imply restriction to redesigning. The company’s status in public and the trend it adopts reflects a lot about their concern and alertness.
These were the two reasons for website designing companies. Let’s look at it from a company’s point of view as well.
Company’s Main Goal
The aim of a company should not be to survive with one-off sales. The main goal for every company should be to build a long-term relationship with their customer base. The reason behind this is attracting new customers with new trends can be costly. Whereas, building a strong relationship with your target base is beneficial as they are more meaningful.
To sustain this competitive market, companies need to focus more on the more meaningful and logical relationship. A company can lose its grip over its competitors due to being more worried about the new website designing trends.
But when we say ignore the trends, we do not mean completely ignore all the trends. For example, designing mobile-friendly websites has become a trend every company needs to adapt to survive. These trends are such that no one can ignore, and one has to adopt these without question.
Adopt the Trend While Keeping an Eye on Market Saturation
Taking cues from a trend and joining the bandwagon might not always be a bad thing per se. Sometimes, it can even turn out to be quite fruitful and yield good results. This is generally known to work in the early stages of becoming popular.
Most of the time, it is advised to avoid new fads regarding web design. However, in some special situations, an exception can be made. In these situations, it only makes sense to take full advantage of these growing website designing trends. The only catch here is that you just can’t apply a particularly popular and trendy web design and then leave it as it is.
Whenever you are implementing a design that is in trend, always make sure to make necessary changes and edits in compliance with your website’s traffic. There are some sites where adopting a short-term design trend can prove to be particularly effective. However, always make sure to keep an eye on them.
It is important to keep changing your website design from time to time. It is okay to introduce a particularly popular design, but that doesn’t mean that it should overstay its welcome. Once the market starts getting saturated with this latest design, you should make it a point to drop it. That is the most important thing to keep in mind while designing your website.
In some cases, you may be using a particular design trend that is necessary for your website. At the same time, other sites may have ditched theirs. But you must retain it since your business calls for that. There is no need to drop a website design trend if there is a special need for that particular one. For example, if your business sells sales and marketing software, a chatbot widget might be a particularly popular element necessary for your website. There is no need to let it go even if other sites have dropped theirs.
You also need to keep a close eye on your website traffic and user data to gain confirmation on what kind of elements will continue to work well for your website. While you are looking up a trend, this should be embedded clearly at the back of your mind.
Utilizing popular web design trends is not such a bad idea all the time. But you need to be in touch and up to date with your clients and their activities in the long haul. The moment you start to notice that:
- There is an oversaturation of that particular design trend in the market.
- The trend has become old and boring.
- Your website visitors and users are;t necessarily responding well to it,
You can ditch that particular design trend and shift your website to a more secure zone by adopting other web design frameworks.
Go Ina Similar but Different Direction
The moment a specific design method or element starts to get well known worldwide, its value also starts increasing vehemently. Then there is more value to it than only its skill to augment conversions or create a good-looking web design.
If you pay close attention to that particular factor instrumental in driving the trend, you can use it to your leverage to implement its strongest suits and make it your own. This will help you to gain something, which has the strength to stay intact.
What will make a unique website design? It is the way you approach a specific trend and decide to implement it. You have to use a growing website designing trend so that your design stands out from the rest of the crowd. Sure other companies will also use that similar web design technique to build their website, but what will make your website stand ahead of the rest of the crowd is how you decide to execute it using your creative abilities.
You do not even need to redesign the website for this purpose. Adopting the base-level principles that are responsible for fuelling popularity and applying them to create your final design will do the trick. You have to study the mechanisms of a popular design fad and understand it to a level where you can apply it for maximum impact. In this way, you can use a short-term fad to your advantage and convert it into something that will stay.
When a web design template becomes widely known, it does not necessarily mean that you have to use it in the same way that everyone else is doing. If you do it like that, oversaturation and overuse will occur, and the trend will quickly get boring in the market.
So what you need to do here is to take a fad that is gaining momentum in the market and make it your own. Use your innovative ideas and creative headspace to serve this purpose. Think about the driving factor for the popularity of that particular design trend and look for ways to make it your own. By doing this, you can give the trend the power to keep its position in the market. In this way, you will also be able to make your website a unique and memorable one.
Many popular websites these days have adopted this special trick to create individualistic websites. They have taken up a growing design trend and studied every inch and corner of it to develop ideas to make the trend their own. This is like going in a similar but still a different direction. You can take inspiration from them and use this trick to create a distinct, catchy, and noteworthy website for your business.
Conclusion
We put our website at serious risk of becoming a cliche and dispensable whenever we overdo it by following a specific and cookie-cutter web design trend. At the worst, we might risk our website getting lost in the crowd and invisible. In a world where millions of websites are coming up every minute of the day, this is the worst possible situation.
What is the best way to appear unique and edgy without falling into the restrictions of an existing design technique?
There isn’t a clear answer to this question. All you can do as a temporary solution is to read in between the lines and figure out which approach is the most suitable for your needs. You can either leave the short-term fad alone and not use it in your website design at all, or you could just adopt it for the time being and try to make it your own. You have to choose between either of the two options.
However, if you are enthusiastic and dedicated enough, you might want to consider the latter. If you want to put in the efforts to make your website a success in the meantime, using design trends to your advantage might be the best possible option for you. However, if you are not willing to take the risk at all, letting go for the time being should be your top priority.
No matter what it is, it has to be your own decision according to your goals.
Dilip Tiwari is an SEO Expert at Universal Stream Solution. Universal Stream Solution is a web development company in Atlanta. That helps startups to enterprise companies in mobile & web technology.