3 Website Design Trends for 2009
Looking at trends for the rest of 2009, here are three Website Design Trends to help you increase your site conversion rates.
Horizontal Navigation
Ever since iTunes introduced its scrolling horizontal carousels and horizontal, flipping album cover navigation (e.g., their movies, TV shows and music videos pages), horizontal navigation has caught fire.
You can now see horizontal navigation in various modes and presentation styles on a wide range of websites. In addition to iTunes, examples include:
The Stella McCartney site is notable in that it integrates video into the horizontal navigation. The FedEx site is notable in that it provides a circular carousel. The Pepsi site is notable in that the horizontal navigation ties together the brand’s family of websites.
Focus on Forms
The bottom line is that if you improve your online forms, you will improve your conversion rates. With this type of direct ROI in mind, expect to see a great deal of focus on form design, layout and conversion techniques this year.
Website Marketing NOW recently wrote about the top 10 tips for improving online form results in “Do Your Online Forms Need a Facelift?“.
The book Web Design for ROI has an entire section devoted solely to online forms. Expect much more coverage of online forms this year.
High Quality Photography
Check out online retailers, and a major trend you will find is their focus on amazing photography. Not only do we now get to see more photos for a single product than ever before, we also get to zoom in and out, turn products around and see multi-angle shots. In certain sites we get to change the color of the products we are viewing with the click of a mouse.
Check out the Martin + Osa website. There, you can see photos not only of the clothing you are interested in, but also of even the stitching and buttons of the apparel. The trend toward this level of quality and granularity is only going to intensify.
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Related posts:
- Marketing Book Review: Web Design for ROI
- Do Your Online Forms Need a Facelift?
- Website Trends: Personalization
- 2009 Online Trends
- 10 Website Trends for 2010
Tags: fedex, horizontal navigation, iTunes, martin and osa, online forms, pepsi, photography, stella mccartney, trends 2009, website design, website design trends, website trends
February 4th, 2009 at 9:42 am
Delighted to see that you’ve included a focus on forms as one of your top trends. We certainly hope so: we’ve just published our book on the topic: “Forms that work: designing web forms for usability”.
Best
Caroline Jarrett
“”The humble form: it may seem boring, but most of your website’s value passes through forms. Follow Jarrett & Gaffney’s guidelines, and you’ll probably double your online profits.” – Jakob Nielsen, Principal, Nielsen Norman Group
February 26th, 2009 at 5:11 pm
Great article. I find myself worrying about using the next “flash in the pan” technology though. I like the idea of the horizontal scrolling stuff, but I think that in a year, it’s going to be outdated. Too bad that fun things like that are so short lived.
I agree completely about the forms. They are the most antiquated part of the web and there hasn’t been a lot that we could do about them up to this point. I’m certainly looking forward to some direction on that topic.
As for the photography aspect… hold on to your hats ladies and gentleman. I think that as companies struggle to survive through the recession and try to cut costs, many of the brick and mortar stores are going to shut down physical locations and throw themselves full force into e-commerce. This is going to require more attention to product detail and the customer experience than ever before. I think all of us in the web development community need to brace ourselves for the oncoming next generation approach to doing business on the web.
January 3rd, 2010 at 10:21 am
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