Web design trends & functionality for 2021

Videos are a great way to visualise your brand and identity on your website. Grabbing user’s attention, they offer an alternative to reading endless paragraphs of text. Videos are always a useful source of explaining your product on an Ecommerce website, service, or offering extra information and how-to-guides.

However, videos must be used with caution on a website. Self-hosted videos can slow your site speed drastically, which can have an adverse effect on your SEO. Best practice is to host your videos on sites such as YouTube and Vimeo, and embed them onto your website.

As with most types of design, trends come and go, and one that has come back in recent years is minimalist design. A lot of websites now and simple, streamlined and to the point.

Gone are long walls of text and unnecessary images. This is great for user experience, as potential new clients and customers can now find and read information on your website easily and clearly. However, with this lack of content can also mean a lack of SEO possibilities, with other areas such as blog content having to be used to show relevance to your site.

Lot’s of new websites in 2021 are also featuring negative space, and are moving away from flashy or distracting images that may lure attention away.

This one goes hand in hand with minimalist design, but also serves a more important function. Having a fast loading site has been an essential element of SEO for a number of years, and is one of the factors that google looks for when deciding where you place your website in search terms.
Quick loading websites and high-performance websites are also great for user experience, as browsers are more likely to stay on your site if they can get around quickly without having to wait for elements and pages to load.

There are many ways you can achieve a fast loading WordPress website including properly resizing your images, using a cache plugin, choosing the correct theme to build with, upgrading your web hosting and not using unnecessary animations where possible.

Chatbots are a feature that enables you to provide customer service on your website without being online or present, especially as more and more browsers want businesses and services available 24 hours a day. Simple requests can be fulfilled, such as if a customer is looking for the best way to contact you.

Of course, when you are back in the office, you can provide a manned customer support messaging system. Services such a Zendesk, Jivochat and even Facebook Messenger can be integrated into your site for customers looking for more information and help.

As with all web design elements, always check to see if your live chat / chat bot has a negative effect on your page speed. As mentioned in the fast loading times section, having a slow website and page loading times can affect your search engine rankings.

Since Instagram changed their logo to incorporate a gradient colour scheme in 2018, there has been an upward trend in popularity for this design feature.

Gradient colours are a great way of showing warmth and depth to what used to be boring block colours. You can also show some different personality in your images by adding gradient overlays.

You can create and explore different colour palettes by using the Adobe Colour Wheel.