Website design is a constantly evolving industry. Every year, we see many new design trends take over the internet. And we have a feeling that we’ll see plenty of great things in 2016 as well.

In this article, we take a look at some of the new web design trends you should keep an eye out for this year.

Biggest Web Design Stories from 2015

Before we talk about 2016, let’s travel back to 2015 to see some of the stories that changed the way we design websites.

Making websites load faster became a vital factor in 2015 with 47% of internet surfers expecting a web page to load in two seconds or less.

Businesses are still moving slowly in adopting responsive designs. A survey showed that only 18% of small business websites use responsive web design.

Mobile internet traffic surpassed desktop users in 2015. And more people started shopping online using their mobile devices, showing a rate of 4 out of 5 consumers shop on smartphones.

In 2016, we expect to see even bigger changes. Here are a few of our predictions.

Card-Based Web Design

After Pinterest introducing the effectiveness of the card-based website design, a lot of business websites and blogs started adopting this new strategy to improve their interfaces (eg: TNW, Dribbble).

This year, the innovative card-based design trend will inspire more website designs, mostly for ecommerce websites, shopping stores, and online magazines.

Designers will also experiment with different shapes, animations, and interaction elements to improve the card-based design trend.

Video Header Backgrounds

The big and bold background header images trend is now slowly beginning fade away as we step into 2016. Designers are now using video backgrounds to replace those large images on the homepages.

This new trend has already proven itself as a great strategy for attracting more eyeballs and encouraging the visitors to stay on websites a bit longer.

Entertaining Illustrations

Adding adorable, inspiring, and funny illustrations on websites seem to be helping many small businesses stand out from the crowd.

It may seem like a more expensive approach to web design, but the use of illustrations will improve your chances of getting through to the customer with easy-to-understand pictures and animations.

Thanks to all the freelance platforms available today, you can now easily hire a graphic designer to create unique sketches and illustrations for your website.

Horizontal Layout

Parallax scrolling was one of the most popular trends in 2015. However, this trend was found less effective for business websites since most people started to abandon websites without scrolling down.

So, this new horizontal layout trend seems like a great alternative design strategy to increase the interaction rate of a website. What’s next in 2016? How about Horizontal scrolling websites?

Slides Aren’t Going Away

No matter how much we hate it, website sliders are not going away anytime soon. Why? Because it’s one of the most entertaining ways to present information to your visitors.

It’s been around for years, and maybe decades, but in the future we’ll see more innovative and creative takes on full-screen sliders (see Acme Experience website) rather than those frame-by-frame static image slides.

No matter how great these web design trends look, always remember to choose design strategies most appropriate for your brand and business when building your website. It’s also best to combine a few of these trends to create one epic website design.

Any website design will be effective, as long as you focus on improving the user interactions and the overall experience of your visitors.

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