Solve : The Biggest Web Design Trends of 2011?

1.	Solve : The Biggest Web Design Trends of 2011?
Answer» 1. Less Use of Flash It is not the fact that Flash is not a great technology...(when used appropriately it is)...but in the past year or so it has been over used, misused, abused to the point that it has developed a bad reputation. Certainly, the ongoing shenanigans between Adobe (creator of Flash) and Apple (iPhone and iPad) are not helping the situation. Today, websites need to have a clean, uncluttered design, fast loading and above all must be Search Engine friendly. This is a problem for Flash and now with the coming of the new web coding languages of HTML5 and CSS3, together with the explosive growth of web surfing on mobile devices perhaps it is the beginning of the end of Flash in web design. 2. Simpler and Cleaner Design Simple. Minimal. Uncluttered. There's nothing quite as "attention grabbing" as an honest, straightforward message on a quiet backdrop. Quiet can be interpreted several different ways. Forget black and white or shades of gray, although these are still very popular in certain industries. Think of GREEN, yellow, red or even blue as your primary color. However, limit your palette to two or three colours. Work WITHIN the shades of each colour for variety and depth. It can be truly remarkable what a few colors can do for effective messaging. 3. Mobile Ready Design Smartphones, tablets, NETBOOKS, the list goes on and on. There's a dizzying amount of mobile products available to the consumer in 2011. This means your web design must be responsive to multiple devices. Creating a mobile ready website is not simply removing the bells and whistles from your existing design. One of the most important advances is that you can design a whole site and allow your coding to conform to the user's viewing medium. It may be tempting to just create a dedicated mobile site, but that may no longer satisfy your audience. Increasingly, mobile sites include the option to visit the original site. If you do not offer this option or if your original site is not optimized to mobile standards, you are simply not ready for 2011. Forecasters predict that smartphones will outsell personal computers this year, and by 2013 more time will be spent surfing the internet on a mobile device than on a personal computer. 4. Large Photographic Backgrounds Large scale backdrops will surge in 2011. These images will be high resolution, and COVERING the entire site. Large photos are an instant way to grab your audience. Massive images were once taboo for web designers, but thanks to better image optimization, faster internet connections, and smarter loading methods, designers can gain a lot in some sites by pushing image sizes to the maximum. Trends also point to soft and slightly transparent imagery that does not over shadow your content, but harmonizes with it. 5. QR: Quick Response You may have noticed those square barcodes (looks like lots of squiggly unrelated lines) popping up on business cards, magazines or elsewhere, so you may already know that they are a hot trend for 2011. These barcodes are called QR, short for Quick Response. And how exactly does QR translate into web design? Quite well, in fact. Simply take a photo of the unique barcode with your camera phone. Like magic, your phone will call up the website associated with that barcode. The beautiful thing about QR is the flexibility. Feature your QR on your website, in order for site visitors to have a shortcut to your mobile site. 2011 is all about mobility and it will be smart to take advantage of this new medium.Thanks for the hints.I heard somewhere that flash is not recommended by SEO experts .If it is true then why thousands of website are using Flash. Quote from: steevewd on August 28, 2011, 01:45:10 AM I heard somewhere that flash is not recommended by SEO experts .If it is true then why thousands of website are using Flash. IMHO... 1. People like "rich content" (little videos). 2. Flash as a format has become widespread on the desktop market; one estimate is that 95% of PCs have it, while Adobe claims that 98 percent of U.S. web users and 99.3 percent of all Internet desktop users have installed the Flash Player, with 92 to 95% (depending on region) having the latest version. 3. Whether Flash is SEO suicide depends on which "SEO expert" you're listening to. Certainly Flash has had a bad rep with search engine operators because of its use for cloaking and spamming and because of lazy or careless site design, but if alternative content is a faithful representation of the Flash content then SEO need not be a problem, I have "heard somewhere". 4. SEO isn't everything. 1. Is "the new web coding languages of HTML5 and CSS3" really going to replace Flash for the vast amount of streaming media now on the web? I'll have to see it to believe it. 4. This seems to conflict with #2 and #3. How would large photographic images be effectively used in web content for small mobile devices? Even, for PCs, this notion of Large Photographic Backgrounds would still be huge waste of bandwidth. Many newer web developers have drifted away from the practice of optimizing graphics for the web, that was much more common in the days of widespread dailup Internet access, due to the growth of broadband Internet access. But, even with my DSL connection, I sometimes encounter a website where I need to wait for images on the page to download. This is usually the result of total ignorance of the web developer regarding image optimization. They'll take a photo from ... what? ... a recent model digital camera, which nowadays can mean something in the range of 10MP or higher resolution photos - just one photo may be 2 -3 MB and over 2K pixels in width - and then they put that photo on a webpage where they're forcing the browser to display it at much smaller dimensions. What they should be doing is resizing the photo BEFORE using it on the web. But, ignorance or laziness gets in the way. So, I think we'll have to wait and see for the FINAL verdict on the use of Large Photographic Backgrounds. I agree with this 5 posted trends ideas, just wondering if its your personal opinion/observation or from a survey or anything. thanks.

Answer»

1. Less Use of Flash It is not the fact that Flash is not a great technology...(when used appropriately it is)...but in the past year or so it has been over used, misused, abused to the point that it has developed a bad reputation. Certainly, the ongoing shenanigans between Adobe (creator of Flash) and Apple (iPhone and iPad) are not helping the situation. Today, websites need to have a clean, uncluttered design, fast loading and above all must be Search Engine friendly. This is a problem for Flash and now with the coming of the new web coding languages of HTML5 and CSS3, together with the explosive growth of web surfing on mobile devices perhaps it is the beginning of the end of Flash in web design.

2. Simpler and Cleaner Design Simple. Minimal. Uncluttered. There's nothing quite as "attention grabbing" as an honest, straightforward message on a quiet backdrop. Quiet can be interpreted several different ways. Forget black and white or shades of gray, although these are still very popular in certain industries. Think of GREEN, yellow, red or even blue as your primary color. However, limit your palette to two or three colours. Work WITHIN the shades of each colour for variety and depth. It can be truly remarkable what a few colors can do for effective messaging.

3. Mobile Ready Design Smartphones, tablets, NETBOOKS, the list goes on and on. There's a dizzying amount of mobile products available to the consumer in 2011. This means your web design must be responsive to multiple devices. Creating a mobile ready website is not simply removing the bells and whistles from your existing design. One of the most important advances is that you can design a whole site and allow your coding to conform to the user's viewing medium. It may be tempting to just create a dedicated mobile site, but that may no longer satisfy your audience. Increasingly, mobile sites include the option to visit the original site. If you do not offer this option or if your original site is not optimized to mobile standards, you are simply not ready for 2011. Forecasters predict that smartphones will outsell personal computers this year, and by 2013 more time will be spent surfing the internet on a mobile device than on a personal computer.

4. Large Photographic Backgrounds Large scale backdrops will surge in 2011. These images will be high resolution, and COVERING the entire site. Large photos are an instant way to grab your audience. Massive images were once taboo for web designers, but thanks to better image optimization, faster internet connections, and smarter loading methods, designers can gain a lot in some sites by pushing image sizes to the maximum. Trends also point to soft and slightly transparent imagery that does not over shadow your content, but harmonizes with it.

5. QR: Quick Response You may have noticed those square barcodes (looks like lots of squiggly unrelated lines) popping up on business cards, magazines or elsewhere, so you may already know that they are a hot trend for 2011. These barcodes are called QR, short for Quick Response. And how exactly does QR translate into web design? Quite well, in fact. Simply take a photo of the unique barcode with your camera phone. Like magic, your phone will call up the website associated with that barcode. The beautiful thing about QR is the flexibility. Feature your QR on your website, in order for site visitors to have a shortcut to your mobile site. 2011 is all about mobility and it will be smart to take advantage of this new medium.Thanks for the hints.I heard somewhere that flash is not recommended by SEO experts .If it is true then why thousands of website are using Flash. Quote from: steevewd on August 28, 2011, 01:45:10 AM

I heard somewhere that flash is not recommended by SEO experts .If it is true then why thousands of website are using Flash.

IMHO...

1. People like "rich content" (little videos).

2. Flash as a format has become widespread on the desktop market; one estimate is that 95% of PCs have it, while Adobe claims that 98 percent of U.S. web users and 99.3 percent of all Internet desktop users have installed the Flash Player, with 92 to 95% (depending on region) having the latest version.

3. Whether Flash is SEO suicide depends on which "SEO expert" you're listening to. Certainly Flash has had a bad rep with search engine operators because of its use for cloaking and spamming and because of lazy or careless site design, but if alternative content is a faithful representation of the Flash content then SEO need not be a problem, I have "heard somewhere".

4. SEO isn't everything.

1. Is "the new web coding languages of HTML5 and CSS3" really going to replace Flash for the vast amount of streaming media now on the web? I'll have to see it to believe it.

4. This seems to conflict with #2 and #3. How would large photographic images be effectively used in web content for small mobile devices? Even, for PCs, this notion of Large Photographic Backgrounds would still be huge waste of bandwidth. Many newer web developers have drifted away from the practice of optimizing graphics for the web, that was much more common in the days of widespread dailup Internet access, due to the growth of broadband Internet access. But, even with my DSL connection, I sometimes encounter a website where I need to wait for images on the page to download. This is usually the result of total ignorance of the web developer regarding image optimization. They'll take a photo from ... what? ... a recent model digital camera, which nowadays can mean something in the range of 10MP or higher resolution photos - just one photo may be 2 -3 MB and over 2K pixels in width - and then they put that photo on a webpage where they're forcing the browser to display it at much smaller dimensions. What they should be doing is resizing the photo BEFORE using it on the web. But, ignorance or laziness gets in the way. So, I think we'll have to wait and see for the FINAL verdict on the use of Large Photographic Backgrounds. I agree with this 5 posted trends ideas, just wondering if its your personal opinion/observation or from a survey or anything.
thanks.

Solve : The Biggest Web Design Trends of 2011?

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