With every new year comes new hot trends in many fields, and in the online based businesses world, the 2012 web design trends are expected to be no different. Websites are no longer about some static and good looking interfaces that impresses when you click them over. It is about combining the right functionality with the right design, both for your target human audience, as well as the search engine robots. The changes in the way the main search engines, especially Google, are indexing and ranking websites (SEO), is one of the main motivations towards the new hot trends for websites in 2012. Although trends don’t start on January 1st, they are something you notice progressively over the new year. These are either totally new concepts, but most of the time, they are just cool modifications of the previously hot trends of the past years. Be warned, if you are web designer; falling behind these new trends shows that you have not kept up with the times.
In 2012, the old hypertext markup language (HTML), as we know it, will be quite different. The current version, still under development, is an all encompassing update to HTML4, Java Script and XHTML1. Its basically a standardization effort to avoid syntax errors, with new inclusions like the and tags. This improved mark up language also defines how invalid documents should be processed, thus ensuring that all browsers are able to treat syntactical errors in a similar manner. This new 2012 trend markup language to look out for is HTML5.
Another trend that has been quietly gaining momentum, with its explosion in to the hot trends list expected early 2012, is the use of large, over-sized headers and logos. The big idea behind this trend is to make an unforgettable first impression on your website visitor. This also takes care of the click-phobic visitor, who has, over time, grown to fear clicking due to years poor navigation experience. What your large headers and logos do is provide a platform similar to a splash page, minus the need for clicking. The visitor just scrolls down to get the details they need.
Single page websites, that have sliders, are also expected to hit the trends headlines. These websites will be more like a business card, showing all the necessary details a visitor may need, including your location, your social media hangouts and so on. The sliders too will improve functionality, by removing the need for the boring dragging the mouse over complicated navigation bars to access information. These sliders mean that instead of a slide show being incorporated in a website, the website itself, becomes the slideshow.
Finally, there is the mobile design, which is already starting to make a huge headway in to the top trends of 2012. With the increase in the popularity of smart phones and tablet technology, web designers will need to learn how to adapt their projects to accommodate this change in screen resolution and size. Luckily for them, there is CSS3, which allows a website designer to make a site that accommodates the mobile technology in to the web design. With more people buying smart phones and tablets, there is a need for websites to look as good on these gadgets. These are some of the 2012 web design trends that are expected to make headlines.
First and foremost a truly successful brand is much more than the sum of its parts: a logo, a color scheme, what an entity says about themselves, and the images they use. The way in which an entity presents themselves and how their target audience perceives them is very important. An audience forms and modifies their opinion of who an entity is every time they are exposed to something that carries our image or endorsement. If an entity, be it a university, corporation, business, or social club are uniform and consistent in their communication as well as their visual identity, and their actions follow suit with the identity they attempt to lay claim to branding can be an unbelievably powerful tool.
