In today’s Digital Age, your personal or professional digital presence is more important than ever. For your organisation, your website is a digital storefront with the power to determine a user’s first impression and likelihood to engage with your brand. For individual creators and self-employed professionals, professional websites are key to gathering traction, gaining user loyalty, and showcasing their skills.

But when it comes down to creating a website, it is important to understand how to avoid pitfalls that will make your digital presence look outdated or untrustworthy.

In this guide by the experts at the Essex Web Design Studio, you’ll learn more about the top 2023 website design trends to consider when creating your website.

  • Hover Animation and Animated Product Reveals
  • One of the key trends transforming website design is the growing presence of hover animations. Although this kind of media has always been considered useful, it has now found new use cases.
  • Website designers can use animations such as fade in or out and slide in or out to enhance messaging, boost engagement, and even renew new products or services.
  • Some of the benefits of hover animations include:
  • Faster and more agile web pages
  • Supporting speed browsing
  • Improving product reveals (especially for eCommerce websites)
  • Provides simple animations of the product
  • Immersive Media and Digital Illustrations
  • Media should be an unmissable aspect of any website. However, simply adding static or stock images to your web pages might no longer be enough!
  • Thanks to advancements in graphic design and digital media technologies, websites can be enhanced through videos, immersive media, and digital illustrations. This kind of media can increase user engagement and improve communication effectiveness. For example, in just under 60 seconds, an explainer video can communicate all about your brand, products, services, and ethos! What’s more, users watching an explainer video are 73% more likely to follow up with a purchase.

Minimalist Designs vs Digital Maximalism

Although minimalism remains a substantial graphic design trend in 2023 and beyond, a lot of your website design will depend on the nature and personality of your brand.

If you are looking to offer a visually different experience to your users, you might consider being among the first adopters of the “digital maximalism” trend. This website design strategy aims to overstimulate the user and reinvent vintage styles, fonts, and media.

Dynamic Scrolling Effects

If you wish to add a dynamic effect to your website, this trend might be the one to adopt! Scrolling effects, such as the parallax zoom effect, create a sense of movement, realism, and depth in front of the eyes of the user.

As the different layers of content move, they provide more information to the user and keep visitors engaged for longer. Although scrolling effects might work for every website, they are particularly suitable for those businesses and industries in which aesthetics make a difference, such as design, real estate, and architecture.

Distinct Aesthetics and The Use of Colour Theory

Colours, shapes, and patterns have always played a role in marketing and branding. However, today, choosing the colours and tones for your website wisely is more important than ever. Indeed, today’s users are flooded with information and options, and the right colour combination is essential to send across your message and help your brand stand out in the digital landscape.

Alternative Typography

On web pages, the fonts and typography style chosen represent your brand’s voice. But while, in the past, web designers focused on written content, the new generation of websites places typography and layout at the centre of focus.
Some trends in typography include breaking layout rules that see text neatly arranged, using custom fonts, adding images over text, and using multiple fonts at once.

Page Speed and Site Accessibility

Google, alongside other search engines, roll out several updates to their algorithms each year. But while some of them are purely technical, some others impact the way marketers, designers, and developers work.

After the last few core updates, it has become clear that page speed and website accessibility are more important than ever for all websites. So, it isn’t surprising that some of the web design trends for 2023 include compressing images, boosting page speed, making web pages more accessible, and boosting the accessibility of content for people with disabilities.

Keeping UX at the Core of Web Design

Lastly, enhancing the user’s experience remains one of the driving trends in website design and beyond. Thanks to today’s advancements in technology, web designers are able to make UX a priority, and not only for the homepage!

Website design tools can rethink the usefulness of 404 pages, make dull privacy policies more engaging, and boost the navigability of the website as a whole.

Are you ready to bring to life a website that meets the highest standards? Get in touch with our team at 01245 939123 or email us at [email protected] to book your initial consultation and start working towards improving your website’s ranking!