Have you been noticing some website design and content trends substantially changing in the past couple of years? With the exponential growth of different devices accessing the Internet and keeping pace with best SEO practices Ilya Posin with Forbes points out a few that stand out:
Goodbye: Mobile Versions of Websites
Instead of building mobile-switched sites (i.e. m.websitename.com), many innovative designers and developers are now focusing on responsive design. It’s not enough to detect devices and switch users anymore. Mobile users are looking for a more fully integrated experience.
With 55% of Internet usage in the U.S. coming through mobile devices, the best shops are doing mobile-first design and treating desktop and laptop design as secondary. Responsive design allows the layout to adjust based on the contextual experience of users. This means site designs need to be built so they respond to the width of the device, regardless of the gadget type. In more extreme cases, functionality itself can even switch, providing an even more contextually optimized experience.
In fact, Google GOOGL -2.17% is even encouraging responsive design to improve the SEO for your site, as it reduces the necessity for multiple subdomains and duplicated content. Mobile versions of websites are a trend of the past; now, you’d be foolish not to design with mobile in mind from the start.
Contact Five Technology to discuss responsive design further.
Goodbye: Text-Heavy Sites
As visual media increases in importance all over the Internet, there has been an unsurprising decrease in text-heavy websites. Instead of telling your story in a paragraph or block of text, the trend now is to invest in more visual storytelling. Text has been cut down to the essentials, while visuals are increasingly employed to impart important information.
This isn’t only true for the design of websites. The increasing reliance on visuals has also crept into the biggest social media spheres. With the rapid rise of visual-focused social channel Pinterest, Facebook and Twitter TWTR -2.85% have both taken steps to increase the prominence and integration of visual media into their platforms.
For sites more text-based by nature, there is a trend towards richer content experiences — text integrated with pictures, video, and interactive functionality. Now, websites are better integrating text with visual components to give users a more immersive and interactive experience. Combining content and visuals to tell a story can help hold the attention of even the Internet’s most impatient users.
Contact Five Technology to discuss what we can do to redesign your site to be more visually stimulating.
Goodbye: SEO Copywriting
For years, SEO copywriting has been a large part of web design and promotion. But Google’s changing search algorithms have made it increasingly hard to keep up with the new SEO guidelines. Keyword stuffing and focusing copy from a keyword perspective is the wrong approach to modern SEO, and will only get you penalized under the new guidelines.
It’s time to say goodbye to SEO copywriting and start developing keyword informed and user-centric content instead. Just like in marketing 101, you need to develop easily understood copy with which your target market will emotionally connect. It’s also important to keep your content on message and use copywriting to build up your brand, instead of focusing on SEO exclusively. Essentially, when it comes to copywriting, you should be embracing a back-to-basics approach.
Contact Five Technology to consult on best content SEO or to discuss any evolving website design and content trends and what we can do to help your site keep pace with current standards and competition.
Read the full article by Ilya Posin.
