Website Design Best Practices in 2019

Décor and design trends change with the times. Shag carpet was a fad. Then it wasn’t. Then it was. And now, well, we don’t even know anymore.

The same is true with website design.

It’s 2019 and these are the big trends you should be paying attention to in web design this year.

Web Copy: Less is More

Site visitors will shut down if a massive wall of text is the first thing they see when the come to your website.

Use shorter paragraphs, especially on the homepage. Save the deep dives for your blog posts and keep the rest of your web copy concise.
When it comes to copy on a page, don’t go crazy. You’ll end up burying your call-to-action. Brevity is your friend.
Use lists and bullet points to quickly get the point across. (See what we did there?)

Simplify the Navigation

There may be a desire to showcase everything your business has to offer in the navigation, but too many choices can cause confusion.

Keep your navigation simple. Instead, use topic clusters and well-placed CTAs to help guide your user through your site.

CTAs

Keep Calls To Action consistent across your site’s pages. Reinforce that regardless of where the visitor is on the site, the CTA will take them to the same place and perform the same action.

This can be especially important on ecommerce sites where the desired action for the visitor to take is to make a purchase.

Optimize Your Design for Mobile

Google is taking its “mobile first” push seriously. What does that mean for new websites? Well starting July 1, 2019, newly indexed sites with Google better look good both on a desktop, and when you’re viewing it in the palm of your hand.

When you design your website to be optimized for mobile, consider:

Readability – Can you see the text on your cell phone, or do you have to stretch the screen out to read it.
Clickability – On a desktop, you have a mouse to help you click around. On a mobile device, you have fingers. Make sure your site is finger friendly.
Load times – Keep it speedy. Both the users’ experience/patience and mobile search rankings can be impacted by load times.
Minimizing pop ups – Can you say “bounce?” Pop ups are super annoying on desktops, but on a mobile device? Get out of here.

Fun fact: 51.3 percent of internet users worldwide operate mobile and tablet devices, while 48.7 percent use desktops, according to StatCounter.

SEO is Not an Option

It might not sound like much of a design element, but search engine optimization (SEO) touches a little bit of everything on your website, and no longer can it be considered “nice to have.”

SEO is a “must-have” part of your web strategy. So don’t make it an after-thought if you’re building a new site, and if you already have a site, there’s no time like the present for a big SEO overhaul.

Some food for thought from Search Engine Journal:

32.5 percent: The average traffic share the first Google organic search result gets.
91.5 percent: The average traffic share generated by the sites listed on the first Google search results page.

Those numbers, and this giant SEO infographic, are a little hard to ignore.

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words

In the age of Instagram, filters and the ongoing quest for the perfect selfie, photography and imagery have become an expectation.

Pictures help shape your brand, sell your product and can reduce the amount of text needed on a page. They also have an added SEO benefit, so make sure that imagery is a part of your web design.

Web Design Agencies

The year is only a little over half over, so who knows how long we’ll have until new website design trends start to take shape. Staying on top of web design best practices is sort of our thing, so if you’re curious about incorporating them into your site, give us a shout.