While you’re busy working on those resolutions you made in attempts to be a better you, don’t forget to keep your websites at their best too! Staying on top of design trends is important because a dated looking website works against you and not for you. A website that incorporates the latest trends in design and function shows that your brand remains on the pulse of what’s new, and who doesn’t want that? Following are some trends that will keep your site fresh and modern in the new year!

Single Page Layouts:

We’ve all heard, “K.I.S.S.: Keep It Simple Stupid”… Single page layouts are all about simplicity. Your readers can click the links in your navigation and view the new information in the same page. No waiting for new pages to load! Excellent for personal pages, online “business cards”… with a bit of creativity (and umm, JQuery) anything is possible!

Oversided Headers:

Designers are taking advantage of the header to make the first impression splash pages used to make. Visitors to your site don’t want to sit through an intro or have to click something to access information from the landing page. Use it as a branding opportunity! Let it take up as much as the entire screen and don’t be afraid to get creative!

Enhanced Footers:

Footers used to be restricted to copyright and contact information, or secondary navigation. Moving forward you’ll see the footer becoming a more significant part of page design, featuring aspects that have usually been found in the sidebar: this is a great place to feature all your social networking streams, like from Twitter or Flickr.

Lightboxes:

Rather than the annoying popup windows that distract the visitor from whatever they were looking at, lightboxes open in the current window and are excellent for featuring information. I like using lightboxes to display media such as images or video, but using Javascript there are really few limitations to what can be displayed in a lightbox window (login or contact forms, maps… think outside the box!). When featuring images or video, you should darken the background so that the visitor is less distracted by what’s underneath making the viewing experience more pleasant.

Get Sketchy:

Add a bit of whimsy to your design using handwriting fonts and graphic elements that resemble doodles and sketches. By no means is this a brand new trend, but you will see page designs using this in more creative ways! Touches of these hand drawn aspects add authenticity to your aesthetic. On a corporate site, this can mean, for example, using a handwriting font on a post-it graphic somewhere to draw attention to something you would like to feature (such as “Don’t forget to subscribe to our newsletter!”) or making it appear that “notes” have been jotted into the margins. On my lifestyle website, CoutureCult.com, I’ve used both hand drawn images in the header and a font that looks like it was doodled, along with a few other “sketched” details throughout the design of the site to pull it all together.

You’ll notice I added simple hand drawn decoration on either side of the ads that are in the header and footer of CoutureCult.com. This integrates the ads into the page design in a way that is more cohesive, making them feel that they are part of the design and not working against the design.

Typography:

Typography is an art in and of itself, and we are seeing web designers start to experiment with using fonts in different weights and sizes, as well as using more than one font together that compliment each other. A good designer will understand how to implement creative typography in a way that is both consistent and eye catching. The outcome can be either sleek and modern or fun and interesting: depending largely on the fonts chosen, the colors used, and how and where it is implemented in the overall design.

Social Media Icons and Sharing:

Moving into the new decade, there is no site that is complete without connecting your reader to the rest of your relevant social networking accounts and giving them the opportunity to share the information on your site in as many places as possible with ease. With social media icons you can, in the simplest of ways, provide a map to your range of destinations online without utilizing much of your treasured page real estate. Similarly, there are now countless ways to provide the opportunity for your reader to share your website, your blog post, your images… with one click! The reader can share a blog post, for example, on practically any social media platform: Twitter, Facebook, StumbleUpon, Digg… oh yes, and email. More of a requirement than a trend, but this post wouldn’t be complete without mentioning the importance of social media sharing.