Website Design Best Practices For 2022
Web Design Best Practices for 2022
Website design best practices for 2022 have changed. They have changed a lot since 2021, and we wrote this article to share with you the best of what we are seeing, what is in, what is out, and what you need to do to keep your website up to date in 2022.
Website Design Best Practices for 2022
Navigation is a Big Deal in 2022. This falls under the bracket of User Experience (U/X), but as consumers spend more and more time and the web, they have become increasingly impatient with websites that are even slightly hard to navigate. People don’t want to search through your entire website any more to find what they came for. And if you don’t show them what they want to see straight away, they will punish your business by hitting the “back button” and finding someone else to buy from.
SEO is also falling in line with this. You no longer see search engines sending people to a home page and having them search from there to find what they typed in for a search query. Search engines like Google now take people straight to the page, straight to the paragraph with the answer, or straight to the exact product.
Lots of websites are behind the times in 2022 with regard to their navigation and information presentation on their website. They still think search engines will send them to their home page and they will search from there. They won’t – and search engines no longer operate this way.
Infographics - Images - Video
If you haven’t caught on to the video trend in website design 2022, you are already behind the times. Same for images.
If your website to be relevant in 2022, you are going to need to start embracing video, Images, and infographics. People’s preferences for content consumption has gone from only being willing to read short sentences, to not being willing to read at all.
Infographics – The only time people seem to want to read any words now is if those words are contained neatly in an easy to understand infographic. Which makes the use of infographics on main web pages a big deal in 2022. If you need to explain your product or service, make sure you explain it with an infographic.
Great Images – Although people aren’t that interested in reading in 2022, they are interested in images. Great images. What makes a great website image? A custom image you commissioned and paid for – not stock photos. When we design websites for companies in 2022, the first question we ask them is what they have for images. If they don’t have images, we encourage them to employ a photographer right away. Consumers visit so many websites now, chances are, they have already seen that stock photo fifteen times today. They want to see images, and they want to be inspired by those images, and they want them to be something they haven’t seen before. Website design in 2022 requires professional photography.
Video Content – We just said that people won’t read your content any more. In 2022, this is absolutely true. But they will listen to it. You should no longer be explaining your products or services on your website in text, or at least not “just” in text. People want to see your product or service in action. They want you to tell them about it so they can listen to it and see it work at the same time. We feel that in 2022, your website design needs both – you need to written explanation, as well as the video.
Use All Three on Every Website Page – If you really want to get ahead of the competition with regard to web design, we suggest you utilize infographics, and great images, and video, and text content on every page of your website. This is how you should be evaluating your web design in 2022: does every page have great images, great text content, great infographics, and great video content for each product or service. And if the answer is no, you have work to do.
2022 Website Design - Minimalism
All of our clients coming to us for Salt Lake City Web Design are asking us for the same things
- Big Photos (as opposed to cropped)
- Wide Open Space
- Little Text On The Pages
We are excited as these designs allow for big, open, expansive vista shots and make for beautiful websites.
Site Speed in 2022
Along with those big beautiful images, infographics, and video content is coming the issue of site speed. To keep Google happy and rank well for SEO, site speed is becoming a factor. We are not seeing this so much at the local level yet, but if you are a big player, and you care about your SEO, you are going to have to figure out how to improve your site speed.
Some simple tips –
- Smush for WordPress to compress your photos
- Never use images on your website over 1mb.
- Use Cloudflare
As annoying as it is, site speed is going to become a bigger deal in the SEO world – especially for retail and ecommerce website design.
Mobile First - Responsive Website Design
Mobile website design used to be something we fooled with AFTER we designed your desktop site.
Not only that but we didn’t focus hardly at all on website design for tablets.
But that has changed. With over half of all searches now being conducted by mobile devices, mobile optimized website design has become it’s own “thing.” This is true to the degree that just this week we discussed our website design packages and are wondering if mobile first and responsive website design is going to take such a large center stage that building one website is now going to be building three individual websites that all have their own requirements.
More time in website design world means more development, and more money for the end user. But like it or not – mobile first and responsive website design is here to stay.
User Experience Centric Website Design
You would think by now that website design companies would have figured out how to make it easy to navigate around a website and find what you are looking for, but that doesn’t seem to be the case at all.
In fact, with the onset of “package based” website design companies who are cranking out WordPress Website Designs for $79 per month, we are seeing a lot of websites that are just thrown together. Imagine twenty PowerPoint slides assembled, labeled and strung together and you are getting an idea of the level of user experience these companies are creating.
We fixate on this at Stay Wild Digital Marketing. We mind map the entire website workflow, imagining every entry point to the website, and then laying out the logic of the pathway the user might use to find what they are looking for.
Users are quick with that “back” button. Quicker than ever. If you make them hunt around for what they came to find, they are going to go try and find it somewhere else.
You have to get into the mind of the website user, and think through what it was that brought them to your website. What were they looking for? Google is a question answering box – what question did they ask Google to land on your site? Don’t make them hunt for the answer.
Beautiful Website Design 2022
Website Design Best practices 2022 must include the idea of beauty mixed with simplicity. Functionality and entertainment if you will.
As people spend more time looking at great web design, they come to expect a level of excellence, and if you don’t provide it, they think you are behind the times. Especially to young people, behind the times means you are not connecting with them, do not understand them, and are probably not a great company to interact with.
Since the inception of the internet, and websites hosted on the internet, there has always been a level of acceptance for ugly websites, and websites that had what you wanted, but it wasn’t easy to find. In 2022, that is finally going away.
A website that is just “o.k.” is now not even close to acceptable. Consumers have developed standards of excellence with regard to content consumption, and they are no longer willing to accept low standards from the websites of companies they intend to interact with.
If you can’t look at your website design and say to yourself, “yes, that is a beautiful website,” then you need to engage right away with a web designer and get to work on your website, or your business is going to suffer because of it – particularly among younger audiences.
We hope you’ve enjoyed this article. Stay Wild Digital Marketing is a Website Design Company in Salt Lake City Utah, with clients across the U.S. as well as internationally.
Drop us a line: tim@staywilddigital.com
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