7 Ruling Web-Design Trends For Small Business In 2017

With the dawn of the New Year, discussions warmed up among the web designers about the new design trends that were expected to rule the SMB websites in 2017. After analyzing the latest website designs dominating most of the small business websites in the first quarter of the year, the web-designer community has drawn conclusions about the web design trends that will rule the year, which essentially include mobile responsiveness, AI-based chatbots, parallax long scrolling, moving graphics, minimalist design and many others. For every small business owner who aims great share of profits from online business, it is unavoidable to take resolution to sync their website in accordance to these web design trends. Let's read in details:

• Animation As Background

Modern users are finding it easier to relate to audio-visual products as opposed to the old static and boring site. As the use of moving graphics as a background for the website is becoming more appealing to the audience, more and more small businesses are shifting their attention to using animations, videos, cinemagraphs and GIFs in their web design. The brand message can be easily highlighted through the animations to treat the eyes of the user and get more engagement in return. If used with data compression and better bandwidth, the animation and videos decrease the page-load time and offer seamless browsing to the user.

• Minimalist Website

With the motto of Less is more, minimalist websites are on the rise among small businesses. With minimized clutter and maximized whitespace (or uniformly colored space), minimalist and simple web design is not just aesthetically pleasing but also offer increases the page speed and makes it even more responsive. It clearly and effectively highlights the Call To Actions aka CTAs that navigate the user to the desired page easily. Pay attention to all the necessary details, show off the white space and omit all the needless things as did by Lachlan Bailey and your minimalist website would be designed to perfection.

• Grid Layout & Card Design

Grid layouts and card designs were popularized by Pinterest and have become quite popular among the web designers. The year 2017 is no less. In fact, there is a visibly increased shift of small businesses towards the adoption of more dynamic card design and grid layout. This type of design looks simple, flexible, organized, and responsive as well. Small businesses can take a hint from Dribble that has perfectly used the card design format for its website to show its abundance of content information in a neat, organized, digestible and easily readable manner.

• Parallax Long Scrolls

With the increasing inclination towards mobile phones for data consumption, people are showing more interest towards long scrolling content as compared to the earlier paginated design. In fact, the latest trend in web design for all the small business is to incorporate parallax scrolling on their website to offer an enjoyable browsing experience to the users. It creates a magical 3D feel to the user while also sharing important information at the same time. One-page layout with parallax effects is becoming more acceptable than before among small businesses because today's user does not want to click again and again to load more pages.

• Engaging Chatbots

Chatbots have created a big rage among the big businesses in the past year and this year these engaging chatbots can be seen making way in the small business websites as well. The AI-based chatbots, on the lower right corner of the screen, can be seen popping up on every website this year. More focus is being given to make the chatbots unobtrusive that offer only the relevant information to the user. 24*7 chatbots can be seen interacting with the users of small businesses, assisting them in various tasks and keeping them engaged for a longer period of time.

• Prioritized For Mobiles

Mobile responsiveness has been the priority of web designers for the past half-decade. However, with the Mobilegeddon update in Google algorithm for mobile-first indexing and over 80% internet users using smartphones for internet access, website prioritized for mobile phone has become inevitable in 2017. The small businesses that have not yet designed their website according to mobiles or whose website is not responding to the smaller screen have started getting their website redesigned to cater the 8 billion mobile users.

• Optimized Landing Pages

Landing pages are gaining more popularity among the small business website and leading to a slow death of the homepage. Small businesses are investing more resources on optimizing these landing pages to provide a more engaging experience. More use of clear and effective image CTAs, video content, optimized shopping cart design and strategic placement of upsells would ensure greater user engagement and in turn more sales. These trends are bound to increase the user engagement, provide value to users and in turn guide them to make a quick purchasing decision. Design your small business website according to the 7 web-design trends discussed above to meet the user expectations and deliver a unique user experience to all your customers.