In the world of web, every coming year brings new discoveries and new innovations with it. We come across new events, incidents, trends, fashions and designs. Similarly, in the world of web we regularly see new developments, styles and features in website design every year.

The innovation in bringing up new elements is being done very tactfully so in order to brief the style of the firm.Every new feature may bring up the potential to advance the experience of the visitors. This can be challenging and exciting both when so many choices are available to pick. All you need is to determine the options that are worth choosing.

Just like our New Year resolution, we have come up with ten essential elements of modern website design that would help you out to give ahead way to your website’s performance.

1: Distinctive & Big Typesetting

Usually, companies use a specific kind of font or typesetting for their customers in order to get easily identified when compared to their competitors. To make it easy communicative and expressive for the brands, there has been a collection of typefaces or fonts introduced to designers in the past few years.

Reasons for its Usefulness:

• Typesetting directs its readers to various areas of the page by using one particular trend of style throughout the website. For example, on the basis of typesetting and font sizes, a website can direct its visitors from a particular segment to another.
• The choice of your typesetting creates an image of your company as it gives an idea about yourself. Who you people actually are. For example, are you something humorous or somber? Are you thoughtful? Efficient? Practical? Or informational?
• Nevertheless, whatever style or font you pick up, it is crucial that the designer must make sure the applicability of it throughout the browsers and systems.
• If the common computer systems and browsers do not support your style, this means your website would exhibit weirdly on different systems.

2: Huge & Receptive Hero Images

Medium.com is not the ONLY example of large sized hero image. There are many more like Ghost, Renovator and Kin HR. The point is that these websites with hero images move the focus of the visitors on the image rather than on the text and social buttons as visual things put more impact on the visitors and inspires them for scrolling the page to read more. Besides, many websites such as Uber have their backgrounds with huge hero images with other content on it. The huge images are strong enough to tell the story behind without putting words to it.

Reasons of its Usefulness:

• You have different customers with different hopes from all over the world who visit your site from different devices like phone, tabs or laptop.
• Strong images like those that Medium uses may not be visible by many people if they are not using desktop computers.
• The users will have a greater understanding of your website, if your images are receptive and visible regardless of whatever device is associated with them.

3: Videos Played in Site Background

Your web page can become worthy enough if there are automatically played videos in the background since these videos are very influential in narrating a tale and lessen the other types of content that you may need to elucidate your business. For instance, when you visit the homepage of Wistia, a video is being played automatically in site background, and you can look more profoundly into the website by clicking the play button. This is the smart way to involve your visitor.

Reasons of its Useful:

• These background videos are easily understandable by the visitors and they tell the main points of your company or business without the usage of any written text.
• Our brain processed these videos 60,000 times quicker than the written material. People are usually reluctant to read too much text, whereas these videos seem easily approachable to them.
• Due to this reason may the connections are becoming speedier and the cell phone sizes are increasing nowadays.

4: Horizontal or Flat Design

Flat designs are easy to understand and grasp. These designs do not have complexities, so they load quickly on the websites. Apple was the first one to shift on flat design in 2013. Afterwards, the other organizations followed the same, but Uber add their own creativity to the style by putting the shadows as well as dimensions. The image below shows the depth in the boxes due to the shadows around them. These shadows disappear when you scroll over and brings out the picture behind.

Reasons for its Useful:

• These horizontal or flat designs are easily comprehended by your visitors.
• It is essential that there should be steadiness all through your website no matter your website is designed throughout flat or you add other elements to bring depth in it.
• You just have to make sure that all the parts or segment of your website uses the same design, whether it is a home page or product page.
• The point is that visitors can promptly grasp what they are seeing.

5: Hamburger Menus

Hamburger Menus are also called hidden or navigation drawer. This menu helps to save a load of screen space unlike the websites that contain long menu for options which surely have an advantage that your visitor directly lands to wherever he wants to. This hamburger menu can be seen in Google chrome on the top right, displayed like this ≡.

It is called hamburger menu because of the three lines piled upon one another that gives an image of a hamburger patty, as you can see in the below image:

Reasons for its Useful:

• It is useful because it gives the clear navigation to the users without any diversion.
• This allows the users to find the relevant information needed to finish the action.
• Users prefer to use elements that help them make better searches.

6: Huge Product Images

It is not by chance if you come across huge product images on B2B websites as these images are helpful to point out the different features of the product. For instance, if you visit Marketo, you will find a huge image at the top. You will find more detailed images of the products on scrolling down the page. These images give an enhanced experience to your visitors as these are very responsive like we have mentioned above.

Reasons for its Usefulness:

• The big images of the products help to spot out the different elements of the products more efficiently and effectively.
• This helps to highlight some of the most valued parts and strengthens the benefits.
• These images develop a strong understanding about the different features of the product without using any word.

7: Card Design

The card design is quite easy to visually disseminate the information as visitors can use small sizes of content without getting dazed. With the growth of Pinterest, marketers and designers are being enchanted by card design.

Card design keeps your homepage organized by splitting up the different content into parts. This makes easy for the users to choose the article they want to look in through deeply.

Reasons of its Usefulness:

• The card design is gaining very popularity, especially on B2B & B2C websites due to its easiness of handling the information.
• By the use of these designs, you can successfully highlight various products and solutions.
• Just make sure the responsiveness of your cards.
• Your cards should adapt according to the sizes of screens.

8: Feature Videos

To bring out any specific case into light, many companies are using short product or feature videos with the addition of background videos. These short videos are time saving and simultaneously give you solutions to many of the issues.

InVision is the great example that displays a very short illustration of their product that how easy it is to use to drag and drop a design directly on their homepage:

Reasons for its Useful:

• B2B firms should create such videos that elaborates their product and its features since these videos have great impact on the decision making procedure of the buyers.
• According to Inc. Magazine, B2B customers who watch online video contributes to 92%, and B2B customers who watch videos when searching products or services related to their business contributes to 43%.
• This allows the visitors to watch your view quickly without spending a long time into it.The long and short, both videos have their own values, but the most important thing is that short videos are time savers to understand your prospect quickly.

9: Personalized UX

The use of cookies to ensure showcasing of more interesting content to the visitors as per their earlier choices is not something new but of course, this strategy has become much more effective than ever before. In fact, this all has become much more classic method than ever before and it is going to be used in 2016 too. This strategy is perfect for repeat visitors who usually like to go through the similar stuff they have already seen on the site.

Reasons for its Useful:

• You must have observed that the YouTube, Facebook and other website make the suggestions differently to every visitor and it saves a lot of time of the visitor.
• When a visitor comes on your site for second or third time, your system does not have to recognize its choices.
• There are easily available plugins which you can use to ensure recording of customers choices.

10. Microinteractions

One of the latest trends in web designs are Microinteractions which are enclosed experiences right within a product, website or a module. Microinteractions revolve around single usage case and you can recognize them while they are popping up as they keep wiggling forth and back on computer screen. These give a wonderful look to the site or else the visitors may get bored with the static graphic.

Reasons for its Useful:

• Microinteraction can be quite helpful in boosting and improving user engagements which simply means, there will be more actions on your site.
• Due to its effectiveness, plugins and themes developers have started thinking seriously about this particular element of website design.
• This will not just give a better look to the site but will also help visitors to take more advantage of the content available on your site.

Final Words

The above discussed are ten forecasted elements to be used in modern websites in 2016 and there can be various others which can help you design even more impressive business website to get more potential clients. Let’s see from the comments section below what are the other design features or elements that are essential to integrate in your website in the year to come.