New Year, New Page: 2022 Website Design Trends Everyone Should Know

With a shiny New Year to enjoy, don’t you think it’s time to give your website an extra polish? Whether you just want to refresh the look, or have a full revamp planned, here’s some 2022 website design trends you need to know about, fresh from the best minds on the Zebra 360 Digital Marketing Agency web design team.

Think Theatrical

The cinema-style homepage offers an immersive video story to pull the visitor straight into your brand. While it’s critical you make sure to stick to the best possible load times to enhance user experience (more on that in a minute), it’s also a creative opportunity to stand-out to the client and hook their interest in your brand. From vignettes to slow-mo, the sky’s the limit for this creative design.

Quick-load, much love

User experience remains the most important metric possible. No matter how creatively you design your page, people will click away in seconds if it’s taking forever to pull through graphical, creative, and third-party elements you run. 

Here’s where you should take a lesson from the social media giants. Most major platforms load only what the user needs to see, called smart content load. It’s a smart way to save resources and please customers. 

Personalization

Personalization remains a critical part of all online marketing in 2022. Customers want to see what suits their needs and interests, and the less fluff the better. Incorporating smart personalization into your web design is optimal, but at the very least make sure you have clear, concise, and on-brand messaging on the site.

On and off switch

Allowing for a ‘day and night’, or ‘light and dark’ interface switch is a seriously undervalued web design element we expect to see more of in 2022. People have fixed preferences about how to read online content, and allowing for a dark mode also helps improve accessibility. Remember, many people use third-party programs, apps, or device settings to force their preferred mode, so there’s no point in stubbornly refusing to cater for both. Rather take control, and make sure your dark mode color palette enhances your brand and looks as good as light mode. 

Overlapping Designs

Here is a design trend to tread lightly with. Overlapped design elements don’t share a container, so they are easy to track and allow for some sleep, professional design choices. However, done poorly it will greatly impact the readability of your design and not in a good way. So use this one with careful attention to overlapping pages and their readability and make sure things collapse properly, or don’t use them at all.

AI Chats

Yes, we know- AI has made every trend list for the last 5 years. However, we are seeing more and more Artificial Intelligence and Augmented Reality tools used throughout digital marketing, even if they don’t look like what we expect. AI chatbots have already become a near-necessity in the web design world, and are likely to become of even more importance in 2022. They’re a practical way to generate leads, nurture customers, and advance your sales funnel. They will likely help you cut costs and boost ROI, too. 

We Like Big Buttons and We Cannot Lie

More and more consumers access the internet on a variety of mobile devices. Make their lives easier, and enhance the size of your buttons. By making the interface properly finger-friendly, you not only make it easier for customers to interact with the site, but indirectly help them enjoy using it more. And you know what happy customers do, right? They buy!

Minimalism Done Right

So-called ‘flat’, or minimalist, designs are all the rage at the moment. However, it’s become conflated with ‘white space’, and that isn’t always the case. There’s plenty of colorful ways to do minimalism and yet keep a strong, visually different brand identity. 2022 will be the year we see more and more of this. Keep design choices easy-on-the-eye and bold, but don’t feel trapped in a boring, monochromatic and characterless box. Think simple.

While having an online presence like a website is essential for modern digital marketing, it’s also a saturated space. Smart, user-friendly, and eye-catching web design helps you stand out from the crowd. For once, all of our web design trends for 2022 also overlap with smart, user-friendly design. Is it time to roll these same features on your site? The Zebra 360 Digital Marketing Agency team is always here to help you make the very best of your web design efforts, so don’t hesitate to reach out today.