New trends in website development
Website development has changed tremendously over the years, adapting as the technology spectrum itself changes. When new versions of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets, the main code used to design websites) emerge, website developers have to alter their code to reflect the new version. These changes and others like it are seen in many of the trends outlined below.
Responsive design
The single most popular trend in website development in 2015-the one thing that everyone has been talking about-is responsive design. Responsive design is defined as the redesign of website content and code to make it fit on all screens, no matter what size the screen may be. Nowadays, a website developer needs to develop his or her websites to fit on phones, tablets, laptops, all sizes of PC monitors and even develop the content to fit larger screens such as HDTVs. The website developer must use things such as stacked menus and content resizing within their CSS code.
Minimalistic website design
Another wildly popular trend in website development is the advent of minimalistic (simplistic) website design. Web content building platforms such as WordPress, Squarespace and Joomla have had an uptick in minimalistic website themes. This is the idea of using minimal text and heavy (but simplistic) visuals to create a website theme. Minimal designs are usually limited to a top menu (the main menu), sleek, visually-pleasing images, only a few colors throughout the design, one style of font and less than one paragraph of text.
Animated website design (motion UI)
Animated designs have been extremely popular in 2015 in particular. They are such a popular website trend, in fact, that animation can be found on nearly all newly-designed websites. Animated design is defined as any piece of website content that moves freely after users either load the website or interact with it. For example, after clicking or tapping on an "add to cart" button, the cart button itself might flash to let you know that the item has been added. Studies have found that animated code is visually pleasing to eCommerce customers and helps drive sales. Animated elements are normally coded in CSS, JavaScript or JQuery and are usually coded to be HTML5 compatible.
Feature lists
This is another popular website trend and is a component mostly used in minimalistic design. Studies have shown that people do not have time or the patience to sift through tons of data when considering what a website has to offer. As a result, website developers have been migrating towards what are known as feature lists. Feature lists include at least one visual icon per feature and list specific things that are included in the product or service. Feature lists can usually be found on the homepage, or on its own page.
Ghost buttons
One website design trend that is quickly taking hold is the ghost button. This essentially means that the button (e.g. the "Add to Cart" button) is one color but looks 2-dimensional. Ghost buttons look partially transparent and will be animated to light up similar to a neon sign to add visual appeal. Most of the time ghost buttons will only be animated ‘on hover,' which means when the user hovers over the button with their mouse.
Picture galleries and slideshows (or sliders)
Picture sliders that showcase featured products or content have been a website staple for a few years now, but they have been especially prominent in 2015. They are on nearly every homepage now, and are almost a guarantee on eCommerce websites. They are the carousel of pictures (and sometimes text) that change to a new slide every few seconds. Picture galleries-meaning, a gallery of at least four photos along with captioned text to let you know what's going on in the photo-are very similar to sliders, and are popular on news websites.
