Like every year before it, 2017 has brought the need for a new approach to how your website should look, feel, and operate. It is important to be aware of all of the latest trends so your website appears current and says to visitors that you understand its importance. There are many hot trends in website design today, but which ones really make you shine?

Update Your SEO elements

If you ask anyone why they have a website, they had better reply that it is a frontline marketing tool for them. One that allows them to communicate directly to their target audience and display to them who they are, what they are about, and they want to tell about their products and services. These are all the right reasons. But to get people to discover all of these wonderful things, they need to get them to their website.

This is where SEO comes into the picture. It has to be at the center of your design and implementation of your website and you need to design your site based on the latest factors that search engines like Google consider when ranking sites. These factors change frequently and some of these changes can drastically affect whether people will find you on Google or not. So utilize an SEO strategy that updates your SEO elements and ensure that your site is optimized for web search.

In the Battle of Flashy Vs. Quality Content, Quality Content Wins

I think everyone has seen so many websites at this point that there is nothing flashy that will impress anyone any more. Good thing too, because all those flash intros not only were time consuming and slow loading, they also really failed in the interactivity department. Although these flash types of sites have gone away in years past what has remained on many websites is the belief that an intro video or animation could cause the visitor to be enthralled with the website. This simply does not happen anymore so positioning your website where it is heavily focused on flashy elements is a no go. What works in 2017 is great content that quickly gets visitors to what they want to know, informs them fully, and does it respectfully and intelligently. So, when you approach a website redesign, think through the questions they will be asking about your company, products and services and then make sure the site answers those questions well. In other words, use the design of the website, to make the content the star.

Full Width and Full Screen

A few years ago there was a trend toward one page full screen websites and they have come into their own in 2017. These sites allows visitors to quickly and seamlessly get directly to the content they want to view and allow you to present products, services and vital information immediately without their having to click through a series of pages. This is the new style of navigation for websites and ones without it seem outdated and slow. So you need to include this particular redesign in your website and if your site already has a version of it, tweak it to add all of the latest updates.

Be Selective With Motion

Yes, the web is going crazy for video and animations. They are everywhere and becoming even more prevalent. And with good reason; they can make a mundane site more entertaining and an interesting one more stimulating. The down side to this trend however, is for every great use of a video or animation, there are twenty that are really bad or overdone. So if you intend to use them (and you should), be selective about how you integrate them into your site. And make sure visitors have an option to start and stop them as well. This idea of a video starting on its own, when someone scrolls down to that part of the page is a terrible intrusion on a visitor and will turn him off to your site.

Implement these elements in your sites redesign or update and you will be ready to shine in 2017!