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Web Design Trends of 2013

January 23, 2013

wireframes2013 comes with a new year and new technology that our industry needs to adapt to. With this in mind, everything from touch screens to retina display makes a critical difference to how customers view our designs. Here are several things to be aware of:

1. Responsive Design isn’t only for mobile devices anymore. There are now tablets and touch-screen laptops that are included in this fluid design technique. In 2012, responsive design flourished and expanded as THE way to design. Mashable‘s website redesign has taken advantage of this technique to neatly distribute its content throughout a vast array of devices.

2. Retina Display causes sites with heavy images to have a “grainy” effect. It’s important to have clear high-resolution images to make sure the high-definition display doesn’t hinder the site. For coding, web developers and designers have also adapted with retina.js and pixel query solutions. Retina.js checks images on the page when a user visits to see if there is a high-resolution version of that image on your server. If a high-resolution variant exists, the script will swap in that image in-place. Pixel query solutions involve multiplying standard pixels by 4 to show more pixels on the same surface area, making the image clearer.

3. Fluid Yet Definitive Framework such as Bootstrap is necessary for the future of your designs as its is sleek and minimal with great navigational design. It is the perfect framework for any device as it can adjust to any dimensions. It has simple yet advanced javascript and customizable components. These features make up the crucial parts of a site in the modern world that can easily adapt to the new technology of 2013.

4. Traffic depends on content quality over quantity. This is a major change and people always embed keywords and a lot of text to take up a page. Minimalism in the layout is similar to the minimalist sense of writing as well. People enjoy going to a site and finding exactly what they came for rather than having to search between all the useless information. Only valuable, useful and helpful content should be included. Everything else is unnecessary. 

With these ideas in mind, a site can achieve success or at least keep up with the top sites in this economy and state of technology. The world of technology and the minds of customers adapt over time and without analyzing the changes, a business can move from the top to the bottom easily. It is important for one to understand that knowing and keeping up with customers is how a business can run and stay successful.