Top 5 Marketing Trends in Web Design

5 Functionalities Your Site Needs to Stay Competitive

As the internet continues to evolve, user expectations of quality and efficiency are rising right along with it. Here’s how your website should perform now and in the year ahead.

1. Responsive Design
This is the single best way to ensure that your site won’t be unusable anytime soon. A responsive site automatically adjusts to the size and shape of screen it’s being viewed on, from a 25″ desktop computer to a 5″ smartphone. Whatever new web-enabled gadgets come on the market, a responsive website is ready for them.

2. Speed and Efficiency
Slow loading web pages are not tolerated anymore. If you haven’t captured visitors’ interest in less than three seconds, they’ll be gone. Likewise, it’s not enough to have good content: that content must be presented in a smart design that allows for fast and easy comprehension.

3. SEO through Content Marketing
The keyword stuffing tactics of yesteryear are dead as a doornail, thanks to ever-improving search engine algorithms that screen out the garbage. To get high search engine rankings now, your website content must be truly valuable to the user. And keywords must not exceed 2% of the total word count.

4. Video Content
Video has everything today’s users want: it’s faster than reading and more dynamic than blocks of text. Even for business-to-business websites, a video is pretty much a must if they don’t want to be left in the dust, as these statistics show.

• 81% of businesses feature a video on their brand website
• 69% of marketing, sales and business professionals have used video marketing
• 96% of B2B companies plan to use video content marketing in the next year
• 59% of senior executives choose video over text on website pages that have both
• The word “video” in an email subject line increases open rates by 19% and click-throughs by 65%

5. Interactive Content
Nothing engages users like an experience they can participate in rather than just take in. Forums, quizzes, opinion polls, contests and 360-degree (walk-through) videos are some of the most popular forms of interactive content that you can add to your website. There’s another benefit as well: when users share their needs and preferences, you can use that (free!) information to make all your marketing efforts more effective.