Although it’s easy to pass off web design trends as they come and go. It’s clear there is definitely a contemporary late 00’s trend going on at the moment. Mostly consisting of good use of white space, large fonts, large images, reflections and bright buttons, we’ve put together a little guide for design features which will immediately bring your site visually up-to-date.
Obviously these tips and tricks are not there to replace updating your website, but they are definitely a great temporary solution when you want to look current, as it might be a difficult time of year for a whole new website build. We hope you find our little guide interesting and useful.
Reflections
Creating reflective objects is very simple to do and it really makes a website looks fresh and new. Right now reflections are very popular, and with the advent of CSS3 which includes reflections as standard in it’s stylesheets, it looks like we’ll be seeing reflections on things for a while to come yet
Large Background Image
If your site is a few years old, it may have a very small graphical tile that repeats to make your background. This looks quite dated, so you should consider a large full screen wallpaper. Internet connections are so fast now, that even a larger image is not really a problem to load anymore.
Removing underline links
By default a link in HTML is blue and has an underline. With just a little CSS styling this can be changed to a different colour (one that matches your site design) and also removing the underline will make your links look less cluttered.
Adding Social Media
If your content is GOOD, people will want to repost it in other places. If you make this easy for them by means of social network buttons, more people will re-post your content and ultimately gain you more visitors to your site.
Using real fonts for your headings
CSS 3 allows you to use real TTF font as fonts on your site. Right now this only works in Safari 4, so a more reliable option is the SiFR tool, which is just a few lines of code and basically it swaps out your <H1> tags with a flash version of the text in the font you want.
Add a blog
Blogs are all the rage right now, and to add a WordPress blog should take you no more than 5 minutes. It’s designed with interactivity in mind, encouraging your readers to comment and leave messages on every page. A blog also gets searched by Google far more than your static site, so by posting your ‘latest news’ in your blog will mean that people will easily find news relating to your company on Google and the other SE’s as quickly as possible.
Make things glossy and add shadows
To add a small ‘sheen’ to objects is very simple, and to then make it appear to be ‘real’ by adding shadows is a very Web 2.0 thing to do. It looks slick and very ‘Apple’-esque.
These are your first steps to quickly updating your site. If you found this useful or would like some more information on updating your site, please give us a call.
Roger Sho Gerhmann
Creative Director