Top Web Design Trends for 2014

Updated June 1, 2022

Simplicity Rules

This year, website design trends have been dominated by a move towards simplicity. Simplicity design leverages best practices to create websites that are inherently user-friendly and uncomplicated. From responsive design for easy mobile viewing to the use of “hero” images to tell a story (goodbye, flash-based sliders!) simplicity design does not, however, mean generic. Great web designers are masters at integrating creative, original designs with user-friendly best practices for sites that are engaging, fun and easy to navigate – driving lead generation and conversion rates. Let’s look at three of the most popular trends and whether they are here to stay.

3 Leading Web Design Trends

#1: Responsive design.

With 55% of all web traffic coming through mobile devices, responsive design is absolutely critical to mobile success, according to a Forbes article on web design trends. Just like the name suggests, responsive web design literally “responds” to a device’s dimensions. It changes the visual display to match to screen size. Goodbye pinching and zooming to view information. With responsive design, content fluidly shifts between one, two and three column displays. Content automatically shifts to match a tablet or smartphone’s orientation and screen size. We expect responsive design to continue as a major web design trend well into 2015. Also gone are the days where you have a separate mobile website. Again, this is where simplicity rules: maintenance of one site rather than two.

#2: Parallax design.

With its sleek, pretty interface, parallax design is one of the hottest web design trends for 2014. Over the last few years, web designers have been increasingly using parallax to guide users through information and tell a story. This approach avoids dumping visitors onto one long scrolling page or even expecting visitors to click-through multiple pages (which can lead to high bounce rates).

However, keep in mind that while parallax is a popular design trend, it can also adversely impact SEO by keeping all your information on only one page. Additionally, parallax is not particularly mobile friendly. So if you use parallax, you’ll need a separate mobile version of your site. For this reason, we predict more designers will move away from parallax in the future. Our advice is to stay away as we believe it’s a trend that’s not worth following.

#3: “Hero” spaces to tell a story.

Goodbye flash and hello beautiful “hero” headers (named after the old-school print design term) at the top of web pages. These headers use big, bold visual images to tell the story of your business and then fast-track visitors down your home page. This approach to website storytelling helps visitors move quickly through your site. Hero spaces communicate a crystal clear vision of what your business does and how it can help them. We predict that more web designers will move towards this simple, effective design technique in the future. We also think it will replace sliders that were very popular.

What do you think of these top web design trends for 2014? Where is design going for 2015?