Web design inspiration for 2017

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2017 is likely to be the year of seismic shifts in the world of web design. As January marches on, the watercooler talk at Barefoot has revolved around what trends are likely to be seen in the design and development industry, and how this is going to affect our work. It’s exciting to be working in a field where the ground is constantly moving under your feet.

Here are some of my thoughts about the new directions our industry is going to head in the forthcoming calendar year.

Accelerated mobile pages

Towards the tail end of 2016, Google was increasing the chatter about accelerated mobile pages. These are essentially minimalist pages designed to lower the resources for mobile devices. We see this as part of a larger strategy adopted by Google to lower its core resources, which have to be one of the major expenditures for a company of that nature. Most of the SERPs are now showing the tell-tale lightning bolt which indicates the presence of AMP pages, and this trend is likely to continue. As ever Google encourages businesses to do it once by incentivising them for higher search ranking positions. From our side, this means all new web builds will be factoring in AMP pages as standard.

The decline of stock imagery

In its quest for originality, Google is pushing users towards creating their own content, even at the level of imagery. The SEO geeks amongst us, have been noticing for a while that you good images, even those taken from a reputable stock provider like Getty, do not seem to appear so readily in search results as their original but less glamorous counterparts. Essentially, Google wants to show users the best answer to their question possible. In the case of images, it makes sense that they would reward those Webmasters who have taken the time to commission, or photograph, original photography to meet the needs of the marketplace. As websites have proliferated like mushrooms on a warm day, so to have stock image sites, so this is a trend we’re welcoming.

Cinemagraphs

Subtler than the video, offering the viewer, movement that draws the eye encourages deeper engagement, the cinemagraph is both a novelty and a stylish web element in its own right. Cinemagraphs are available on Shutterstock if you don’t mind using stock, but creating one from scratch is actually easier than you might have thought. Assuming you’ve got a decent camera and access to video editing program, it’s not rocket science to create a loop which repeats. Photoshop makes this process particularly easy. Remember to compress the file to ensure fast page speed load time. Try to keep it under a megabyte.

The arrival of the Complex mega Navigation (MegaNav)

As User Experience evolves as a science the enormous top-down hierarchical menus evolved been replaced with newer, subtler, menus can incorporate images, subpages, and even featured content. This is known in some circles as immersive navigation, meaning hovering over a mouse enlivens the menu to cover the entire screen in some cases, revealing menu items are far more intuitive. The terms for these menus is mega nav, they have wittily been described as a drop-down parents, children, and grandchildren. The key focus of mega navs is that they are multidimensional panels divided into groups of navigation options, carefully structured by typography, icons and relevant images. You won’t find scrolling on these menus: everything is visible at once. In short, they are stylish, logical and one of those things you can’t believe hasn’t existed until now. They are here to stay.

Virtual reality and 360 video

Now that VR headsets gaining traction, as no doubt that we are going to see more VR interactions in the web development sphere. Google VR view is easily incorporated far JavaScript API certain enough to add. Google, example, is using 360 views in its maps already, as you discovered you’ve ever tried to look around your street. The combination of your headsets and 360 view media will provide the kind of immersive Internet experience that is going to become the defining element of gaming environments, particularly over the next few years. The key limitation here is going to be the, as yet limited, availability of relevant video. The technical term this type of video is Equi-rectangular panoramic, which is a format available to anyone with the Cardboard Camera App and Google’s own conversion tool. This is an area watching closely with much excitement.

 


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