Watch for these Web Design trends in 2016!!

Why is it significant for a company who is not a designer? Well, if one spend hours on writing a blog, wouldn’t it be best that you stand apart visually.

1. Usability

In 2016, design will be all about the users. UX (user experience) will be the new black indeed.  No one actually cares about your cool design looks if it’s not usable. Engaging users really comes at the front. If user experience is not taken into account, it will be difficult for you to grow your online business. Your website needs to load fast and be easy to use according to Google’s algorithmic changes. Loading page speed is a major issue with ecommerce sites. Adding 1 second of bloat to your website means sales drop by 27%. So you will surely want to choose a website which works fast over looking cool.

 Picture Courtesy:-www.ernestoolivares.com

2. Responsive Design

Today, mobile is the first screen and it’s known that a responsive site is not an option anymore. Google is already crushing sites which don’t offer a mobile friendly experience when it comes to rankings. Usability is quite important in all the platforms and since mobile is the first screen, user experiences on mobile is the key. A good responsive website design will have perfect usability on mobile screens.

Hiding a desktop feature for mobile phone users is not an acceptable solution anymore. Standard wise, if users can’t fully experience or enjoy your websites while using their phones, then whole of your website needs to be redesigned.

Responsive web design will reach logos, banners, hero images and any piece of visual content you can think of.

 Picture Courtesy:-www.ernestoolivares.com 

3. App inspired Web Design

People are getting more and more used to faster browsing experiences in native apps. Web designer companies have long proposed that websites must learn from app design’s quick wins (speed, tailored user experience, zero distractions). Now, marketers are catching up with this trend.

As web becomes more and more saturated place after a time in which login areas were frowned upon, more organizations will bring them back, either to add app like features or to add level of exclusivity.

Remove all unimportant information and let the user interact with your content as fast as he can.

 Picture Courtesy:-www.cdn-images-1.medium.com

 4. Clever Menus

The important thing is that users should not be distracted from what is really important to them at a given point. The hidden navigation’s which appear out of nowhere depending on user’s action will soon be the norm. From experience, even if we can’t see it at the moment, we can say that there is a menu on every website and it will appear when we will need it. Experts predict that clever menus will fully respond to multi dimensional scrolling and as it is an evolving trend, it has variety of shapes and forms and no clear standard.

 Picture Courtesy:-www.cdn-images-1.medium.com

5. Modules and Modular text

The first thing to breakdown large texts in the web is to try writing in short paragraphs as no one likes to read long texts. But later design came to the rescue and offered a modular approach to web page layout. Modular design is a technique where everything is built using a block grid pattern. But it means patterns which are hard to anticipate which make it easy for us to read and be interested in various parts of website/ book/ brochure/etc.

A website is certainly more fun to read when our eyes can jump from one module to another and the type of content changes as we hop along just like reading a magazine.

 

 Picture Courtesy:-www.cdn-images-1.medium.com

 6. Modular and Infinite Scrolling

What is the latest move in the modular trend? Scrolling. This means that every module on a website may scroll on its own, independent from other modules. It may be sometimes hard to notice in sites with a sidebar that doesn’t scroll at the same speed than the main content. Most popular sites like facebook and twitter or pinterest use infinite scrolling, so why shouldn’t everybody else? Infinite scroll may feel extremely addictive when the content is right for the audience.

 Picture Courtesy:-www.cdn-images-1.medium.com

7. Material Design

This has been appearing in this kind of lists and predictions since 2013 but it wasn’t widely adopted until 2015. Material trends that you will find in websites, art works, and apps will be adopted hugely during 2016. They are going to dominate.

 

Picture Courtesy:-www.cdn-images-1.medium.com

8. Flat Design

Flat design is not dead however material design came along to fix some of the flat design’s usability problems. In fact, flat design will also grow up to be more popular in 2016. With lot of big brands adopting it in last few years, major population are aware of the fact that less is better when it comes to visual. It has another UX advantage: image files weigh less and do not add unnecessary burden to page load time.

 

Picture Courtesy:-www.cdn-images-1.medium.com

Source Url:

http://surevin.com/blog/watch-for-these-web-design-trends-in-2016/

Prime Web Design Trends to Look Forward To in 2016

In these times, where trends come and go quite often, web design is a quickly moving and changing industry. While still work going on some of those trends now: flat design, responsive web design, speed and performance, and perfecting the user experience. Many new design trends come from taste and preferences of designers and users in usability and design. Improvement in technology is what makes these changes possible. It’s a major driving force and also helps design move forward.

However, what are the new emerging trends we can watch out for in 2016? Let’s look through some of these we can expect to see more of this year.

Recent years saw trends such as:-

• Minimal
• Flat
• Video Sliders
• CSS Animation
• Newsletter Popup
• Long Scroll
• Hero Images
• Hamburger Menus
• Responsive
• Mobile first
• Fronted Frameworks

 

Many of these will continue to get refined while some will get replaced with better alternatives 2016. Some will be used with moderation like background video.

• Material Design – it’s an alternative to flat design which brings back some nice graphical elements. It’s a Google design standard set which separates elements using the layers concept that is found in image editing software. It stacks and removes elements as they are needed. Also built in animations that are normally created manually.

• Still Experimenting With Navigations And Menus – putting it in a new and unexpected place, hide it behind a hamburger icon or just remove it because it doesn’t look good. Experimenting and doing new things to work it well and be useful.

• To Scroll Or Not To Scroll – we know that scrolling increases readership but some definitely wants less scrolling. There are merits and demerits for both. Long scrolling feels natural and easier than clicking but spaces out content and makes it harder to scan. While shorter scroll gets to the point quickly but increases bounce rates.

• Designing In Modules And Components Instead Of Entire Pages – instead of mocking up entire layouts, web design is moving towards component design and modular for a particular web page. Designing how the search function will work, the navigation will be laid out are involved in these components.

• Design Continues To Flatten Out – flat design will continue to dominate design aesthetic throughout 2016. Those websites which already embraced flat design trend will look to make things even flatter.

• Ditching The Stock Elements For Something Better – ditching the use of stock elements such as stock photography or icon sets over things which are much more designed and personal to the site itself.

• Forms And Inputs Go Full Screen – from the wide spread adaptation of responsive website design, website design practices are being carried throughout entire website instead of only the mobile versions.

• Rich But Subtle Animations – as web design is flattening out, websites have started to look more alike. Only way designers are trying to make their sites stand apart from the crowd is through the use of rich, clever and subtle animations.

Source Url:- http://surevin.com/blog/prime-web-design-trends-to-look-forward-to-in-2016-2/

All About E- Commerce: What it is, How it Works And Website Security

What is E-Commerce and how does it work?

Electronic commerce known as eCommerce which itself is a broad term for selling through website on internet, electronically. With having the ability to process credit cards electronically on internet, just about anything can be sold over it. More people are buying online and enjoying the merits of convenience and more often lower prices. Online stores reduce prices because they are able to eradicate overhead costs such as having to pay employees to run brick and mortar store. In today’s busy world like ours, convenience is an advantage and is everything. 

 

Shipping times have now become so fast that if anyone orders an item online, it can be at the buyer’s doorstep the next day. Every e-commerce website has built their whole business model around easy and quick shopping. E-commerce websites are built differently but they all use same core function. The capability to provide the feature to accept credit card is clearly a defining factor. Most times, it processes through a payment gateway and not the website, for security reasons. 

 

A payment gateway is a company that works with credit card companies to be sure that all transaction of credit cards is processed securely and card numbers are not stored by small businesses. But for this you must have an account with the payment gateway to accept credit card on the website. Though all the transactions processes through a gateway, the viewer will never know or be directed away from your website. The website will be guarded with encryption using an SSL certificate, making it impossible for frauds. When the purchase happens, the money will directly be transferred to your businesses’ bank account.

When an order is placed, customer’s purchase and payment information is showed in administration section. You will login to view this information. Through this administration section, you will also be able to add new products, update them and maintain your website fully.

Security, in a world where internet criminals and website hackers won’t stop at anything to steal the information your customers may provide you, is of the utmost priority for your eCommerce website and online store. When processing credit cards through e-commerce website or when personal data is being entered, a strong security strategy is a must to have with proper safeguards in place. Using SSL, a secure server is the best way to protect website information transferred through it. It uses 128 bit encryption. Encryption means the information is transferred in code so that if anybody intercepts the message, it won’t be readable.

At the bottom of the page or in the address bar, secure websites contain a “lock” icon. It is circled in the image below. The lock will only appear if you are on a page which contains sensitive information, such as a checkout page or when entering personal data. Only because the lock doesn’t appear through the entire shopping process, it doesn’t mean that the e-commerce website is not secure.

Source Url:-

http://surevin.com/blog/all-about-e-commerce-what-it-is-how-it-works-and-website-security/

Responsive Website Design Patterns for Great User Experience on Mobile Devices

When it comes to website development, as it is a vital step, Responsive web design is not being discussed that much. Designers and developers have got to understand the importance of efficient responsive design and role it has in maintaining a great user experience for the users.

That time has been passed when there was choice regarding responsive rendition of website and responsiveness was just an option. As the web took over mobile devices, many failed to identify the challenges faced for smooth user experience on mobile phones. According to a survey, 73% users browse the web via mobile phones making it impossible to take risk of not having proper optimized and user friendly website design.

Responsive Web Design has become more of a phenomenon on usual basis rather than a trend now but it still has flaws which make the process inconvenient than friendly experience. Because of this we are here to discuss some practices which can help us achieve perfect experience which is expected of us:

·         Easily Usable and Intuitive

Users are generally not ready to have patience while operating on mobile phones. Especially when it comes to confusing operations generated out of messy and cluttered web designs. This leads to poor experience for the users. Momentum is the key factor to be kept in mind by the designers and developers. An intuitive web design means one without the mess and ugly looking. Any type of design irrespective of being simple or advance must be easy to operate and clear in what it has to offer. Interaction should fulfill the purpose and has to be straight forward.

·         Responsive As Compared to Regular Experience

An important decision to realize when coding for mobile devices is the difference between casual browsing experience and a mobile one. Websites on mobile devices should be short version of their bigger websites that contain summaries which cites the main use of it. It should consist of the adapted graphics and focus on users thinking and have logical order of the different processes. 

·         Analyzing and Application of Data

A/B testing services were aimed for giving an opportunity for improvement without having a direct interaction. This can be applied for mobiles and its usability can be tested and understood by analyzing data provided by Google Analytics. You have the specific data and known audience so you can create better experience using the ability and make it easier to fit the needs of the users.

·         Need Specific

If we talk about serving the needs of targeted users, having data to work with is a great help. There are different ways to target users but if focusing on specific kind, each niche has its own requirements.

E-Commerce

E-commerce websites designs deserve most attention because they directly affect the revenue. Mobile e-commerce is a hope for retailers and stores considering the amount spent on it. Various techniques highly specific to e-commerce responsive web design as the mobile phone user is different from internet one. Keep in mind these points:-

1.              Impulsive Purchases
2.          Unexpected shopping
3.           User Decisions

Responsive Patterns on Grid System

Responsive websites usually follow pattern on a grid system. Though they vary from website to website, certain needs are to be taken care of while deciding the usage of it. Most of the time sticking to patterns which can be categorized like: layout shifter, column drop, mostly fluid, off canvas, etc. canvas design fall into these main categories but there are many modules that can be used in the designs. Images, videos and similar files of media shall be taken care of in a proper way like how mobile phones react to these files or forms a responsive layout.