When it comes to web design, there is so much to talk about. Today I want to talk about trends that are, let’s be honest, being changed every few months.
Animation
As a freelancer with over 400 projects behind me, there is one thing I can tell you for sure. Customers usually don’t know what they want until you show them. Whenever I receive a mail from any of the hiring websites such as Guru, UpWork or Fiverr I start praying that my customer knows at least basics of web development.
People who want their website to be developed usually expect you to build them a freaking space ship. They want their future website to rotate, fly, fade in, fade out, etc. They don’t even know how badly animation can affect their website. They also keep complaining when something works on their desktop pc but not on smartphones. Then you need to explain them responsive basics and animation and other topics you can lose lots of time on.
My personal thought is that we should keep following all the trends when is about animation. Web design is not that simple sometimes. I usually tend to keep my work as light as possible. I try to only use jquery if I can.
Pictures
Ahhh those pictures… Copyrights, alts, size, responsiveness. I had a funny situation recently on Fiverr when a customer bought a photo from stock at 5000px x 5000px. The size of this photo was 22MB. Logically I had to compress it to under a 1MB so it can load quickly inside his website header.
Somehow, he noticed that I’ve resized and compressed the picture and started complaining. Since I was really tired and had no patience, I’ve placed a 22MB picture on his header, uploaded his website online and sent him a link. He was waiting 10 seconds for the website to load. After that, he finally understood what I was talking about. I guess sometimes you need to show them so they can understand right?
My personal preference for pictures is Cloudinary. It does a good compression and it’s pretty simple and easy to use. When I can’t get the desired result with Cloudinary, I use Gimp or Photoshop of course.
Web design platforms
Googling web design or web development will return you a result page which will show a WordPress on the first page for sure. This is a reason why 80% of people that come to me are asking for their website to be built on WordPress. This is not necessarily a bad thing. I mean, WordPress is a pretty good platform. But so are Wix and Weebly. Developers usually don’t mind using WordPress since it makes it easier for them. Also, SEO experts just love WordPress because of the famous Yoast SEO plugin that does everything for you. I am using it right now actually.
WordPress was, is and is going to stay the top web design platform. It offers free and paid themes together with plugins and widgets that can make your website dynamic and incredibly good looking. Most of the WordPress themes are already responsive so you don’t need to waste time on that. I see web design as a trend that is going to change a lot in the next three years. The main reason for this is, of course, the newest device such for example Galaxy S8 with infinity display. Developers could actually use this screen to make something crazy looking.
Hosting and Domain
Everyone who needs a website will also need a domain and hosting as well. I am not sure if this is a trend in 2017 but I am offering my customers a package that includes a hosting and domain they want. I charge a little bit more without spending a dime. Let me explain this. Since I am a web developer, it’s almost impossible to land a job or gig without a good portfolio to show off your skills.
Therefore since I am already paying for my portfolio hosting and domain, I’ve taken a premium package that includes unlimited websites and hosting with unlimited storage and traffic. So you see now why it costs me nothing or a little (usually 10$) to offer this package to all my future customers. My predictions are that this might become a standard in the near future. Developers will realize that they actually gain more than they lose money while offering this kind of packages.
One thing is certain when it comes to web design thou. Google is leading this trend together with other popular companies like Twitter that have its own framework called Bootstrap.
I guess I am saying that I am following web design trends and I can also say that I am pretty excited about where is our future going to lead us when it comes to web design. So I guess we will have to wait and see.
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