New Designs? Increased Usability?
An Expanse in Knowledge and Appreciation of the Web?
Yes to all of the above!
Responsive Design
First and foremost lets address the obvious, accessibility and usability of your website. If your site is NOT responsive, stop what you are doing and get that site updated. I mean, like now! If you are looking for more traffic and better search results you will not find it with an outdated site, period. Google prefers responsive websites because they are crawled easier. Web standards are important and it is just as important to make sure you are updating your website to implement these new standards.Aside from increased SEO, users today are accessing sites more from their mobile devices, more than 50%. So, if your site isn’t mobile friendly and responsive you are missing out on reaching your market. Check if Google thinks your site is mobile friendly with their new mobile-friendly test.
While your site may be mobile friendly it may not be responsive. Responsive design serves all devices with the same code that adjusts for screen size.
Google recommends using responsive web design for the following reasons:
- Makes it easier for users to share and link to your content with a single URL.
- Helps Google’s algorithms accurately assign indexing properties to the page rather than needing to signal the existence of corresponding desktop/mobile pages.
- Requires less engineering time to maintain multiple pages for the same content.
- Reduces the possibility of the common mistakes that affect mobile sites.
- Requires no redirection for users to have a device-optimized view, which reduces load time.
- Saves resources when Googlebot crawls your site. For responsive web design pages, a single Googlebot user agent only needs to crawl your page once, rather than crawling multiple times with different Googlebot user agents to retrieve all versions of the content. This improvement in crawling efficiency can indirectly help Google index more of your site’s content and keep it appropriately fresh.
Increase in Web Users
People are increasingly turning to the web for information, whether it be research or to connect with a service or business. Your business is never too small to have a website, and frankly, if you don’t have a website you are missing out and losing business to your competitors that do – and that’s a fact.
GoDaddy surveyed businesses and found that 83% of the businesses with online platforms said they gained a competitive advantage over other businesses that do not have websites.
Pushing the Limits
While 2017 will undoubtedly push the limits of design we begin looking to those that create outside the box to help lead us to incorporate various aspects in a “real world” scenario for our clients. Various features such as Video, Innovative Scrolling and Parallax, Vivid Colors, Advanced Animations, Bold Typography, and Original Imagery can be added to designs to bring them up to date and engage the visitor without breaking the bank.
With 2017 just around the corner, web design will begin to move away from the very flat trends that we’ve been used to seeing. Bold styles will continue to grow and help convey brand image while also incorporating an end user experience that is easy to use.
We are excited to enter in to the New Year with such new and exciting things happening in web design. While we’ve seen a lot since we started in 1999, 2017 is sure to be the most exciting and engaging year yet!
Are you ready to start 2017 off with a bang?!
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