These days, your website is a powerful extension of your online brand. It’s the key to you making a first impression on thousands or even millions of people. But if your website looks old and outdated, that first impression will be that your brand is out-of-touch.
What if you finally gave your website that long-needed overhaul?
If you want to offer a more modern impression, you need to embrace modern web design ideas.
Ready to spruce up your own site? Keep reading to discover our favorite website design ideas to try in 2022!
1. Memphis Design
A love for nostalgia and all things retro has resulted in a return to ’80s aesthetics. However, if you look at designs inspired by “synthwave” and “vaporware,” you’d think the 1980s were all about minimalist designs featuring shades of pink and purple.
Memphis design represents is closer to the actual ’80s aesthetic, with a variety of colors combined in creative ways as a kind of rejection of minimalism. When done right, this design provides a very chaotic look that stands out in a world of clean, corporate lines.
2. Like an App
The majority of users will visit your website using a mobile device rather than a desktop device. This is why it’s always smart to design your websites with responsive design.
But if you want to create a mobile-friendly website, you should try designing it more like an app. That means plenty of animations, interactive buttons, and intuitive design.
You don’t have to reinvent the wheel here: just think about the kinds of design elements you enjoy in your favorite smartphone apps and try to integrate such designs into your own site.
3. Visible Borders
For years, website designers have tried to make sites more immersive. This is traditionally an effort to make a website look and feel like nothing else.
However, one of the most popular website design ideas bucks that trend entirely. This trend is known as “visible borders.”
As the name implies, this is all about putting visible borders on the edges of your website that make it look more like a framed photo than a digital artifact.
4. One-Page Design
The best website design ideas are ones that do more than make a website look good. The best designs make a site more streamlined and easier to both understand and navigate.
And it doesn’t get more streamlined than a one-page design. Such sites are a bit like an interactive poster, offering a combination of a striking image and engaging links all on one big page.
Keep in mind that this simplified design works best if you have a simple page, such as a digital portfolio or online art gallery, and want to drive users to a simple CTA, such as emailing you.
5. Typographic Hero Image
One of the most compelling reasons to research different website features and design ideas is that you want your own site to stand out from the competition. And if you want to do something only a few other sites have been bold enough to try, you can use the typographic hero image design.
You know how traditional site design is often built around strong images? The typographic hero image design philosophy involves reducing or even eliminating images on your sites. Doing so helps your text and font choice take center stage as the first thing visitors see.
6. Online Scavenger Hunt
The explosive popularity of Wordle helped prove a simple fact: that web users love puzzles and games. In fact, one of the many reasons people love Wordle is that you can play it on a simplified website if you don’t want to download an app.
But what if you could bring that kind of “puzzling” design to your own website?
For example, websites are perfectly designed for you to create online scavenger hunts. And the reward for someone figuring out one aspect of the puzzle can be that more content on your website becomes available to them.
7. More Interactive Site
By now, you’ve probably noticed a trend: everything old is new again. In other words, modern web designers are always hard at work finding new ways to channel our collective love of the past. And the latest result of that is a return to interactive animations and other interactive elements on sites.
Back in the day, these animations would’ve been powered by Flash. While there are newer ways to create interactive animations, your basic goal is the same as it ever was: to create a website that users engage with in creative ways.
Think about it: we often do nothing on a website beyond clicking and scrolling. But interactive animations make us swipe, drag, and perform other motions that break us out of our doomscrolling rut.
8. Split-Screen Design
Our favorite web design ideas are the ones that help a webpage jump out at visitors. And that’s one of the reasons that we enjoy split-screen design so much.
A split-screen is just that: a screen split into two or more separate sections. To help these sections stand out, you can use different fonts, background colors, or images.
By using different colors, you can provide a contrast that helps each section stand out. Additionally, this color contrast helps keep different sections separate without using anything as harsh as a line, frame, or border.
9. Moving Type
Obviously, things like animation (and especially interactive animation) can really stand out to website visitors. And if you really want to take someone by surprise, you can instead integrate animated text!
Moving type has become increasingly popular as a way of helping text stand out. And you can use it in interesting ways to spice up what would otherwise be bland sections.
For example, you can use animated text to create a kind of “news ticket” effect for recent website updates. As with animated tickers on television, this moving text naturally draws the eye.
Web Design Ideas: Your Next Move
Now you know what the hottest web design ideas of 2022 are. But do you know who can help you make the most of these designs and your own website?
Here at Key Element Media, we specialize in web design, SEO, Google Ads, and more. To discover what we can do for your website, all you have to do is contact us today!
