Trends in the field of website development change as time goes. Within a decade, the industry of web design has transformed completely. Since content marketing is a crucial factor in the success of any business, this unique marketing strategy must feature new trends to increase audiences. As the standards of the market are changing, user preferences are shifting, as technology is evolving. The aim of marketing content is not only to improve your services and products but also to offer your website users relevant and timely information to aid them in solving their problems.
Content marketers today must assess personal situations and adjust the developing market trends more rapidly. They have to stay updated with a new set of updates. This article will take you through some of the latest website development trends that 2019 brings. These elements will help you make an efficient website, and also provide you with a general idea of where your site requires updates.
The web design world is continuously evolving to adapt to new changes in search engine algorithms and the expectations of the users. Every year, new trends are introduced, some fade, while some just continue to reign supreme in the digital world. A good web design will boost your ranking on search engines.
Single Page Websites
In the near future, websites that are single pages will become one of the most valuable website development trends. Suppose a site where there is no navigation through web pages, shows stuff that is not messed up, only featuring on a single page, and a tool for navigation is getting you through the various webpage aspects. Single-page web design will help you conserve time since the scrolls are few, and there is no navigation through pages. An example among the best single-page websites can be found here: https://cssnectar.com/css-gallery-inspiration/strum/.
Mobile-First Approach
The millennial generation will focus on websites and applications for mobile platforms. Mobile consumers are rising fast across the world, reducing the number of internet users on desktop platforms. Therefore, before embarking on your website development process, remember that your site or application has to be mobile-friendly.
But what does Mobile First mean? It is straightforward. The mobile version of your app or website should be the priority for Google Index. If your site increases traffic from Google Ads, the traffic most likely comes from mobile platforms.
Accelerated Mobile Pages
Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is an aspect from an open-source that is backed by Google. The critical feature of AMP is to increase the speed at which a website displays data to the user. It helps your website load content quickly after the user clicks on it, and save data more than eight times than the old sites.
Customer Support and Chat Boxes
Research shows that more than 85% of communications with customers will occur through machines in Singapore by 2020. Chat boxes are a result of robots owing human intelligence. They help you to maintain your users for prolonged periods and answer their questions right away.
Web of Things
Most of you have heard about the Internet of Things. The next version of this aspect is the Web of things, and it utilizes and becomes accustomed to different web protocols to link up anything in the universe. Web of Things enables these protocols to provide them with a World Wide Web presence.
Insights Driven by Data
The primary intention of SEO marketing is to ensure a reliable and convincing customer experience. Thus, marketers in Singapore have the task of developing and distributing factual content to the suited audience at the right time.
Since most users spend more time on the internet on their mobile devices, there are vast amounts of information to influence company strategies in all fields. To get the most significant output, your online content marketing agency should work on collecting, analyzing, and interpreting data to transform it into valuable insights and operational marketing campaigns that are data-driven.
Advanced UX and UI of Sites
Website designers in Singapore in 2019 will need to add high-end UX and UI in the websites to ensure maximum benefits. User Experience (UX) is the process of improving the satisfaction and loyalty of users through enhancing the ease of use, usability, and amusement given by the relations between the user and your products. User Interface (UI) is the process of transferring the visual aspects and strengths of your brand to the interface of the products to best enhance the experience of the use. The process involves visually guiding users through the interface of a product using user-friendly elements across all platforms to give them a responsive experience.
Live Features and Videos
Due to the development of mobile technology, the need for content featuring interactive videos is increasing. In fact, studies have established that conducting online marketing campaigns using visual content is a powerful approach since humans pay attention to visual content quickly. The audience needs incredible content that pokes out, entices them, and relates them. Live streaming and video features for marketing campaigns will enhance your efforts to stand out against your competitors. Some platforms for social media like Facebook are developing and optimizing their live video aspect to enable users to market their content and include themselves in the videos.
The Comeback of Email Marketing
Although many people see emails to be among the disappearing categories of communications, emails continue to be a significant marketing approach to get and elevate audiences in Singapore. Studies show that people send around 205 billion emails a day. The number is rapidly increasing, indicating that emails are increasingly becoming a source of information for audiences. By 2019, the number is anticipated to be around 246 billion emails per day. Therefore, putting email marketing into consideration is a valuable recommendation as it remains to be among the rising trends.
Progressive Web Applications
Since the development of progressive web applications in 2015, it has continually become a significant aspect that you must consider when developing your website. It helps to offer your audience a similar experience on both desktop and mobile platforms.
Use of GIFs and Animations
First, it is important to point out that excessive use of GIFs and animations can compromise your website’s user experience. However, if used correctly, the two can breathe life into your site and make it stand out from the crowd. One of the main reasons why you should consider using animations is that they show users that you have an in-depth understanding of design. You can also use parallax effects to add more depth to your site.
Flashy Typography
In the recent past, nobody dared to use hyphenated words for fear of hurting their credibility and ranking of the site on search engines. Today, big and bold typographies are used by thousands of web designers in not only Singapore but also other parts of the world. Before using them, it is important to understand the rules and ways of utilizing the design tools to get the best results. Experiment with different colors, fonts, and spacing to find one that best suits your business.
Use of 3D Geometric Shapes
The flat web design quickly gained traction soon as it was launched due to its bold colour blocks that made no reference to the actual world and minimalistic icons. A few months down the lane, Google introduced Material Design that offered a whole new perspective about geometric shapes. This new design allowed web designs to use more shadows, motions, and bold geometric shapes. This year, expect to see more use of 3D geometric shapes on website designs and backgrounds.
These three trends will have a significant impact on the web design world. Get ahead of the competition by implementing them fast before everyone starts using them.
Top Web Design Tools for 2021 to Promote Efficiency and Productivity
If you are looking into designing a website today, there are numerous routes you can take. Read on to find out the best web design tools for 2021.
InVision Studio
Photo credit: Adam Enfroy Ventures LLC
InVision Studio is a web design tool that lets you create advanced and vector-designed based screen designs fast. The software has flexible layers and infinite canvas that makes it one of the top web design tools in the market.
InVision Studio helps you speed up your workflow, design interesting and interactive prototypes, and communicate your designs with your team and customers. Moreover, this tool can also help you test your designs and handle any question, concern, and design change before you get into the development phase.
InVision Studio is one of the InVision suites of tools that also contains the InVision cloud, which allows users to connect store and share their complete product design workflow. The InVision DSM, also a part of the InVision suite of the tool, is the design system manager and library where users can store and control their brand and UX components. InVision Studio is compatible with Mac and Windows.
The resize and crop images without masks feature auto-crop images when changing sizes more intuitively. This feature is a must if you need to crop into circles, rectangles, and rounded rectangles. Other notable features of the InVision Studio include:
- Fixing elements when scrolling
- Linking several artboards into a single animation
- Creating swipe triggers for parallax animations
- Creating responsive prototypes without writing codes
- Allowing mirror prototype to user phones
- Allows the use of sketch-like shortcuts
- Toggling between light and dark themes
- Real-time collaboration with the team
Sketch
Photo credit: Kinsta
Sketch has become a regular competitor of Adobe Photoshop due to its robust functionality. Sketch is made specifically for users’ interface design, thus, why it’s growing in popularity among designers. Sketch is digital design software for Mac users only, developed by Bohemian Coding in 2008. The software package includes everything a web designer needs to create interfaces, websites, and icons in a pixel-perfect vector format.
Sketch allows users to work on desktop and mobile versions simultaneously, thanks to its Craft plugin. The tool is interactive and lightweight to run. It can also create smaller files, a feature that most platforms, including Adobe, don’t have. This is a big deal if you want to create files that load lightning fast.
Sketch includes shared styles that work like CSS stylesheets allowing you to make a change once and apply it universally. This helps to save time and eliminate style inconsistencies between revisions. Additionally, Sketch lets users swap entire symbols set at a time. This is especially essential when large numbers of icons and divots are piling up in your design project. With this tool, you can override symbols and object styles.
The high number of plugins in Sketch help make your workflows seamless. The speed, functionality, and navigating tools have made Sketch popular among web designers, as you can do almost anything with the tool.
Adobe XD
Photo credit: The verge
Adobe XD tool is perfect for allowing web designers and developers to manage aspects of user experience as they create apps, websites, and other digital products. The tool is available for both Mac and Windows computers and iOS and Android mobile devices.
Adobe XD, a vector-based design tool, can be used in creating products at all stages, including prototypes, mockups, final design, and user testing stages. The tool is currently the fastest UX design solution in the industry, allowing small and large teams to share and develop their XD projects together.
With this software, you can test the mobile application’s user experience, design, and functionality or use the website. Independent designers and small and large web development teams find XD to be a beneficial tool as it enables them to collaborate on design projects. Moreover, the tool allows them to keep each other on track and organized in one project without losing track of their progress or the necessary tasks.
Working in large team settings can cause colleagues to cross wires and accidentally work on completed projects without their knowledge. Adobe XD helps teams optimize their workflow and daily practices to ensure that they produce the best work with as little organization as possible. Some of the notable uses of Adobe XD include:
- Information Architecture (IA)
- Wireframing
- UI Design
- Prototyping
- User Testing
- Development process
- Seamless collaboration
- Scaling with design systems
Marvel
Photo credit: Marvel
Marvel is another design app that allows users to display their work with easy-to-use mockups, wireframes, websites, etc. The marvel app is a very user-friendly tool with an easy learning curve. It has many utilities to help users design their preferred digital page.
With the Marvel app, users can test out the compatibility of the user interface and user experience. You can also make your customized versions of websites without any technical skills as you test out millions of assets. The app’s level of personal customizability is beyond fantastic as not many services will give out such utilities to a user without a catch.
Every action and service is customized; therefore, you do not have to think about it too much. You can achieve all you want with just a click of a button, especially when making aesthetic Marvel app prototypes. Moreover, you will be able to import all your content easily without much struggle.
The advantages of using the marvel app include
- It’s easy to use
- It contains numerous graphical options
- Automatic backup
- Compatibility with different products
- Allows commenting on prototypes
Figma
Photo credit: Section
Figma is different from most design tools as it combines the best and most essential features of all other tools and applications. Features such as design prototyping are integrated directly into Figma, which means that you do not need to use third-party software to complete the prototype. The app is web-based, which also means that it can work on most devices.
Figma’s flexibility allows it to be used on most operating systems, and apart from being compatible with Windows, it’s also compatible with Apple macOS, Linux OS, and Chrome OS. When using the tool, designers are connected since the software has no cross-platform restrictions.
Figma contains features that make team collaboration seamless. After determining what type of website you want to create, Figma provides you with the necessary features and tools to build sleek and stylish user designs that the core audience will love.
Since Figma is a web-based app, it makes it easy for teams to collaborate for every design task that should be completed for that day. Figma shows everyone editing and viewing a specific file at the top of a document as an avatar.
Every team member has access to the document and has their own named cursor that makes it easy to determine the kind of changes made by every team member. Real-time collaboration helps prevent misinterpretations from teams regarding different design elements.
Figma allows web designers to hand off their designs to developers without issues, unlike other tools that don’t take into account the need for developers to build around designs. After sending design files to developers, they can view every component in the design without using third-party tools.
Affinity Designer
Photo credit: Web Knowledge Free
Serif Labs’ Affinity Designer allows users to design and manipulate graphics that can be scaled. The app is a developer of affordable PC and windows desktop publishing tools for beginners.
This app has a highly intuitive user interface for new and old designers, allowing easy transitioning between it and Illustrator. Affinity designer’s tools are well organized and can easily be accessed by new designers.
Affinity Designer has all the standard and pen tools to help designers complete vector and pixel-shaped artwork. The tool can help users manage documents, blend modes adjustments and effects, edit images and build artboards with the in-built tools.
The software enables creative teams to add paragraphs, character styles, frames, and ligatures to their texts. Moreover, they can preview designs in standard and retina resolution while creating artboards of different sizes using screens, menus, or pages. Some of the benefits of Affinity Designer include:
- Importing and exporting files
- Workspace features
- Availability or worldwide purchase on Mac OS
Balsamiq
Photo credit: Balsamiq
If you are looking for a simple Wireframing Tool, Balsamiq Wireframes might be the best option. The tool offers a web design experience that is similar to sketching on whiteboards. The only difference is that you will be creating the web sketches on a computer. This app is keen on the website structure and content to deliver the best user experience.
With this app, you can explore numerous user interface components and icons from the Balsamiq community. Moreover, the tool will help you create interactive prototypes using the Balsamiq Linking Feature.
Balsamiq is useful for developers and designers who are visualizing their ideas quickly with low-fidelity wireframes. Rather than focusing on fine details, the Balsamiq interface focuses on the basics with its interface and elements imitating hand-drawn styles rather than focusing on fine details.
The app is easy to learn and use, with most designers agreeing that it is as simple as dragging, dropping, or arranging elements from your menu onto the canvas until you get your desired interface. This app is aimed at creating wireframes in a short amount of time.
MockFlow
Photo credit: MockFlow
MockFlow is an online software allowing designers to create a website wireframe. The tool contains a drag and drop editor, wireframe creation, and presentation tools. It is a perfect platform for beginners as it puts everything in a single place. Beginners find it useful as it’s free with numerous tools.
MockFlow supports team efforts for every organization, whether large or small, to prepare for the digital era by laying the basics for quality web and mobile apps. The software invites developers and designers to showcase their creativity by making wireframing an easy and more efficient process.
This app allows users to visualize the website and mobile app without the hassle of coding. You can view this software’s features, demos, and testimonials on the website’s Web-Based Software Development Platform.
Flinto
Photo credit: Medium
Another excellent UX design prototyping tool is Flinto. The tool gives you all the assurance to create high-fidelity and user-friendly experiences. Flinto has consistent updates, and users pay on an annual basis. Flinto is almost similar to Sketch, and it’s easy to learn despite there being numerous educative tools and tutorials about it.
Flinto is supported in Mac and is one of the most popular tools for web design. Using the platform provides a high-fidelity prototype, and the benefit of using Flinto is that it supports design importation from Figma and Sketch. You can also share the app through links.
Origami
Photo credit: Origami
Origami is a well-renowned tool created by Facebook designers. The app is substantially essential to applications such as Messenger and Instagram. This app is free and a perfect fit for experienced designers in user experience designing.
Starters may find the app difficult to use, although there are numerous educative tutorials about it. The app has the potential to create the best prototypes fit for the desktop, mobile, and tablet.
Framer
Photo credit: CSS-Tricks
Framer offers advanced interactivity in prototyping as well as sustainable teamwork. With annual billing to users, the app offers access to up to 3 projects with two editors. If you have a fast-speed browser such as Chrome, Framer will work perfectly well. Its prototypes are interactive and of high fidelity.
Framer supports inline commenting and one-click photo sharing. This tool is also great for teams of designers focusing on understanding how developers get their design work.
Axure
Photo credit: WelldoneBy
Axure has numerous user experience features incorporate into it. The app is billed annually, and it looks similar to other prototyping tools. You can use Axure whether you have any coding skills or not. Although it requires no coding skills, it can be an excellent idea to familiarize yourself with numerous front-end coding concepts and begin with a clear understanding.
You can use Axure with MacOS or windows platforms and process quality prototypes appropriate for tablets, desktops, and mobiles. The app is loaded with plenty of features supporting concurrent editing and shared files access in cloud servers. Like Sketch, Axure is an ideal option for developers since it has a simple and understandable interface.
Bootstrap
Photo credit: SitePoint Pty.
Bootstrap was initially conceptualised and developed by the Twitter engineering team and has become the world’s most popular tool to build responsive websites that targeted mobile users. The tool has an open-source database of JavaScript, CSS, as well as HTML templates that you can use to design your dream website.
Some of the features that give it an upper hand in the market are the responsive breakpoints and grid system that make the coding process quick and seamless even for people with limited coding experience. The database also has a plethora of different header, forms, buttons, navigations options so find ones that suits your business and personal preferences won’t be a problem.
Canva
Photo credit: HubSpot
Canva is a fee designing platform used to create exciting and attractive designs to support a web template. The app is perfect for building images that can be added to a web design. Canva comes with plenty of templates to make your work easier.
If you have no designing skills, Canva’s templates can be helpful in building professional-looking images for the web template.
The free Canva plan has over 8000 templates, with the pro plans going for about $9.95 per month. The pro plan includes advanced features such as the ability to export transparent PNGs and the option of resizing graphics for multiple use cases in a single click.
Hype Professional
Photo credit: Colorlib
With Hype Professional, you can produce animations like you are working with After Effects that create animations via keyframes. Hype Professional records your animations and automatically exports them to HTML5. The tool does not need any coding skills and can work on various devices, including mobile desktops and tablets.
Hype allows users to add, remove and rearrange keyframes manually if they need more control. Hype is an incredible tool if you want to animate anything, including web pages, eBooks, presentations, and infographics.
The runtime library for Hype is relatively small (25KB in size), thus, giving plenty of room for the user’s assets. The runtime drives the animations while managing browser compatibility issues, although the app will still warn you if a feature does not work on a specific browser.
Conclusion
Effective functioning in the field of website designing in Singapore requires a developer’s dedication to ensure that your website features new trends. The time to change your site before it gets too late has come. We hope that the upcoming trends discussed above will help you in your journey to optimizing your online marketing strategies.
