Today's Top Website Designs
10 Trends: How professional web designers get noticed
Top website designs trends are always changing, much like the seasons. Before you turn around, yesterday's top website designs and professional web designers are today's ancient history. To stay on top of your online game, you need to stay on top of today's top website designs and professional web designers.
To that end, here are 10 hot trends in top website designs today:
- The Online Magazine: As the popularity of print magazines fades, many top professional web designers are borrowing from some of the design elements that made them once so popular. And the familiarity people have a magazine style format is not to be underestimated. Especially when so many people are still uneasy with the Internet, seeing a format familiar to them will be a welcome relief.
- Carousel Slideshows: First we had Flickr-mania, now we have iTunes carousel view of album covers. All of it goes to show we are all just crazy about our photo albums, and as the top website designs show, the carousel method of showing a slideshow of eye-catching images on a single page without a lot of download time is one way professional website designers help you maximize a webpage.
- Richer GUIs: For a long time professional web designers have overlooked the infinite possibilities in online graphic user interface design. But that has changed. Now today's top website designs feature user interfaces that are gorgeous, unprecedentedly responsive and interactive - more like those of familiar classic desktop software applications. Programming languages like Flash and Ajax now enable professional web designers to create dynamic web pages that aren't cumbersome for people with slow internet connections.
- Big Letters: Don't know why humongous typefaces (like 36 pixels plus) are so popular with top professional web designers, but they are. Perhaps because user statistics show that they appear in many of this year's (and last's) top website designs.
- Media Blocks: That's those little YouTube style TV windows embedded within a larger webpage that shows a short video. It's obvious why the top website designs incorporate these gems - they finally can in a way that users across a wide spectrum of technical specifications and internet connections can easily view. Professional website designers were waiting for the day the technology came to allow them to do this. And now it's here.
- Social Networking Elements: With the social media boom, it's almost negligent not to include some sort of social media element into your web design. Be it Twitter, Facebook, Digg, StumbleUpon, Technorati, or any of the countless others, incorporating them into web pages is not just something the top website designs do, but seems to be something that every trafficked website across every industry seems to be doing.
- Lightboxes or Modal Boxes: Love 'em or hate 'em, these second-generation pop-up boxes are popping up in all the top website designs. Triggered by some sort of action on the user's part (like logging in or filling out a form), these boxes pop up above the primary content to convey some sort of relevant additional message. Very often professional website designers will include a close button making it easy for the viewer to return their screen to the primary content on the main page.
- Icons of the author. People like to know who's speaking to them. So including these cute and possibly playfully enhanced images of the author of a given piece of content is one way professional website designers personalize a website for their client.
- Icons in general. In fact, people like these cute little images so much that top website designs are including them wherever they can these days.
- Adding a personal touch to a website is a trick all professional web designers know. But the top website designs are the ones that find ways to artfully incorporate that personal touch into the design, such as by using author icons, dialogue bubbles, organic 3-D elements like post-it notes on the page, or handwriting and other hand-drawn elements.
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