What was your main aim behind building a website for your company? You would say, to promote your business and market your products, right? But a bigger question is do we know another stark reality - Without an appealing web design most of your efforts to monetize visitors go in vain. Now that we are in 2017 already, it’s paramount to figure out what trends will appear and evolve in web design this year. So, here is a complete list of top web design trends that will rule the web in 2017.

Top Web Design Trends to Look Out for in 2017

• Vertical user flows: That mobiles have become a commonplace for users to surf the internet, web designers would feel enticed to give their websites the feel of vertical patterns and scrolling. Even Google confirmed last year that it witnessed more searches via smartphones than desktops. So, it’s important that your web design allows users to scroll more on smaller screens. In a nutshell, vertical user interfaces will become the thing of present in 2017 to lure prospective customers into visiting your sites, and thereby increasing conversion rates.

• Card-style interface designs: Card-style designs are becoming ubiquitous since they help a great deal in giving personalized experiences built on collection of many individual pieces of content. Knowing that cards provide a perfect view of content from different sources, popular sites like Facebook and Pinterest have already joined the bandwagon of card-style architecture. Rise of mobile technologies has greatly contributed to the emergence of card-style interface designs.

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Image source: www.droid-life.com

Cards-layouts are a great medium to communicate stories and make it much easier for users to scan blocks. The freedom users get to view content immediately and as they wish is the biggest reason we find card-style interfaces in several apps, websites and printed pieces. And this trend is highly likely to surge in 2017 right from where it ended in 2017.

• High quality background videos and images: Users understand a story more clearly when they see visuals and motions on your website in the form of photos, 3D graphics and HD quality videos. A website background with large-sized photos or headers with large images or hero headers gives users an entranced view your website. Thanks to recent advancements in mobile technology for making it possible to reduce bandwidth and compress images without compromising on quality.

Image source: www.udemy.com

According to ClickZ, online content video views surpassed 50 billion a month for the first time on record. The implication is crystal clear, grace your website with snappy background image and high quality videos to grab the attention of users.

• Motion animations: Anything that involves movement catches a human eye. Motion animations rose in popularity in 2015 and the path is set for them to surge even higher in 2017. We can expect their sizes to decrease, but they are a great medium to keep users engaged while they wait for content to load. Web designers first need to identify the purpose tiny animations have to serve so that they can create the desired effect on users.

Image source: 1stwebdesigner.com

• Stylish loading bars: We all know that users quickly disappear from sites that take more than four to six seconds to load. The remedy to the poorly designed loading page is a loading page itself, but it must keep users interested and doesn’t let them drive away from your site. The loading page can tell users the story of what you do. For example, a car-selling site could have a loading bar that looks like a car running towards the finishing line.

Image source: www.pinterest.com

• Unique typography: Typography is where art meets text. In 2017, designers will realize the potential of typography to give their websites a unique look. The typeface of your website is important for branding since it plays a big role in whole representation of your website. You must ask these two questions to yourself before deciding on the typography for your website:

Which fonts could reflect your brand identity?

Can users see in them the message you want to deliver?

Typography indeed has an impact on conversion rates, thus it’s very imperative that you make use of more usable web type tools like Google Fonts and Adobe Typekit.

Image source: gtechdesign.net

• Hamburger menu: Since the whole world is moving towards smaller screens, hamburger menus are expected to rise to even more popularity. A hamburger menu rids the need of taking too much room on a website. Hamburger menus make a site appear free of navigation clutter like drop-downs, social icons, search bars and utility links. Since most people are familiar with the usage of a hamburger menu, web designers would like to place navigation under it in 2017.

Image source: techcrunch.com

• Websites with full-screen slides: We have already seen websites with sliders where images move within a frame to display content. These slides then transformed into full-screen slides. These full-screen slides bring new content after being refreshed with a click, scroll or timed effect. The advantage of these full-screen slides is that they give users a physical experience as they navigate forward and backward. In 2017, we can expect an abundance of sites trying to nack upon on this concept.

Image source: nowtheme.com

• Bold colors: Web designers will increasingly make use of vibrant colors and bold tone combinations to add a unique eye appeal to their websites. Unlike 2015 when more monotone big colors designs were used, larger and brighter color palettes will be used in 2017.

Web design trends keep on evolving to add more to site aesthetics, be it visual or text. The above examples are top trends that seem to reign web designing in 2017. If you have any experience in custom web design and development and want to add more to what has already been discussed, please share them in the comment box below.