The last couple of years have been a rollercoaster for nearly every industry.

Now, it’s time to start looking forward to what’s coming.

How do people expect brands to communicate and act in a post-pandemic world? How has social media interaction between brands and consumers evolved? Is B2B marketing the same old lead-generation story, or has content marketing changed the game? What will the most cutting edge websites look like in the coming years?

All these questions are answered in our Big Book of Trends in 2022.

We put together all our experience, combined it with meticulous research, and put everything together into a number of deep-diving articles on each major area in the marketing industry.

We’ve linked them all at this end of this post, but we’ve put them together into one beautifully designed eBook for you to read at your own pace.

Just fill in the below form, check your email, and you’re all set!

Individual Articles

If you prefer to read the articles individually, just click on the one you want below.

Marketing Trends 2022: The Year of Conflict

Web Design Trends 2022

SEO Trends 2022: More Human

Social Media Trends 2022: The Year of More

Consumer Behaviour in 2022

Brand Trends 2022

B2B Marketing Trends 2022

The post The Big Book of Marketing Trends in 2022 appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

Fair warning, this is a relatively long read. If you don’t have the time to take it all in now, you can download the PDF version of Web Design Trends 2022 for free by clicking below. Otherwise, just keep reading!

Intro to Web Design Trends 2022

Mobile apps may be on the rise, but for most brands, a consumer’s first impression of them is their website. 

The website is the oldest form of modern brand communication. It has had to contend with two decades of accelerating user requirements and design influences: Web 1.0 technologies that cannot support today’s needs, growing demands by consumers to see technology expressed differently, the expansion of social media as it interweaves with the web, and a steady acceleration of mobile-first web consumption. 

The next 12 – 18 months are going to see upheavals that are much bigger than the slight evolution that design and marketing has been seeing over the past decade. 

Web design is no different, so we’ve asked our designers to collect the research they’ve been doing to figure out what’s changing in 2022. 

This is what they found out. 

Page Speed and UX improvements

When Google released its algorithm update in June 2021, web developers were suddenly being pulled into SEO conversations in ways they hadn’t been before. Before then, they hadn’t had much to do with the SEO side of things: that was what SEO experts were for. 

But as speed and UX scores became even more crucial for any brand that wanted to rank, SEO experts started to look at the way the sites were built in much more detail, beyond the technical analysis scores and content on those sites. 

This isn’t surprising. It’s what needed to be done years ago, put off and set aside until brands had to make those changes. With website traffic decreasing, web design theory needed to catch up. 

And now we’re here: with websites loading even faster than ever, algorithms more complicated than we started with, and designers who have to contend with the changes and make it look good. 

In 2022, a lot of the trends we’re seeing are built around speed and advancing UX algorithms. Here’s a few we keep thinking about. 

At least one successful micro-metaverse

Head of Studio, Andrea, considers the metaverse one of the more interesting concepts of 2021, something that’ll carry over into 2022 – but what the metaverse will ultimately be is still an unanswered question. 

“We’ll be constantly defining what we want the metaverse to be – right now, there’s a lot of misinterpretation and question marks about the metaverse, and early adopters jumping onto this idea that doesn’t yet have a clear definition. However, by mid-2022, we’ll probably see some big corporations embrace the idea of the metaverse, possibly as a tongue-in-cheek reference, like Wendy’s Fortnight expansion. Brands that especially turn to offering digital products are going to be lured into the idea of expanding their brand into the metaverse and creating a miniature world where their brand is everywhere.”

More shared virtual experiences

Shared experiences brought people closer during the pandemic, when lockdown was everywhere and people were mostly trapped in their own homes. They created their own communities then, with whatever they had available: group chat apps that allowed you to watch videos or games that helped you connect with strangers to play. It changed the way people considered proximity and community. 

In the almost post-pandemic, that isn’t going to go away – even though it’s at odds with the ‘anonymous online’ part of the web. 

In 2020, Porter Robinson started releasing singles on his site where you essentially enter a virtual space with one other stranger and listen to the song together. 

For 2021, we had apps like Skittish, that brought events to you with a mingling of business and pleasure applications. 

For 2022, we’re going to see more of the understated, low-key shared experiences that the early internet was known for: small, simple, and intimate connections between relative strangers. 

Vanillification 

We’re now stuck to screens for an unprecedented amount of time per day, and the time we spend on websites has to matter. The idea of remote-first isn’t going anywhere; in fact, it’s getting deeper and transmuting into webpage experiences that are pared down to the essentials and can still take you places. 

Our head of design says, “Remember, your phone or laptop are essentially teleportation devices – web design needs to consciously facilitate this feeling of ‘travel in a still travel-semi-restricted world.’ And it’s not only about going to places that don’t exist.”

Sorina adds, “We’re going to see a move back to clean design, with generous white space, allowing room to breathe, and this ties in really well with Google’s recent algorithm changes and the rising demand for mobile-friendly websites – the simpler a design is, the easier it will be to make sure it works the same across devices.”

Our CEO, Rik, has a point to add to this: “As more people work remotely, it’s not only farmers who are experiencing slower connections. People who are used to working on a fibre connection suddenly have to contend with the slower internet speeds available in more remote places, and they’ll be looking for sites that don’t take ages to load.”

Inclusion through typography

Designers love their tiny text. 

In 2022, they’re still set to rule – but not entirely on their own. The remote-first modus operandi means that previously inaccessible events are open to a lot more people than before; it’s time for the web to reflect that. User-dictated type sizes and adaptable colour schemes are in, as are alt-texts, captions, and a greater emphasis on keyboard navigation, both manually and by voice. 

The Return of Experimental

Minimalist app design has a lot to answer for when it comes to modern web design, and for a good reason: as a new technology, it was imperative that digital services were easy to understand, use, and navigate. 

That was then. 

Now, we’re going back to the roots. Work has changed. The way we work has changed. 

The way we interact online is also going to change. 

Nella says, “Ever since March 2020, our lives have been turned upside down, so I don’t see any harm in having some fun with web design in the near future. Re-introducing bold and playful combinations of colour, a mix of harmonious typography, some animation and an overall sense of positivity, is definitely a step in the right direction.”

Outdoors, Indoors

Plant parenting, solitary hikes, the great outdoors: lockdown life brought a lot of people back into the fold of nature, and that’s set to keep going into 2022. Websites that use tranquil, soft tones and try to create a sense of calm aren’t new, but this is one of those underpinning trends that’s likely to cause big shifts in how we approach web design. 

Additionally, the ongoing climate crisis is a big driver for more natural web design. Nella, says, “This is also a nod towards awareness of the environment, our impact on the planet and a quick realisation of how much time we spend daily, looking at our screens. Young designers whom the industry relies upon to innovate have lived through this short period of pain, but have also been born into a warming planet. They’re hungry to innovate and they will most certainly push the market to do so as well.”

As I Do, So Do You

Behavioural design is an age-old principle that has shaped the products that surround us. It is poised to see a surge in 2022 as brands use data in novel ways for them to stand out from their competitors. Cleverly blending collected data with web design will further enhance user experiences. 

According to Sorina, “behavioural design is based around cue, action, and reward, and a lot of apps use it today, such as Headspace. Headspace’s success is largely due to its ability to keep subscribers engaged and ‘active’, using personalised daily playlists, stats, schedule syncing – and it’s successful because these are the methods that it chooses; it understands what its users find as motivational.” 

It’s All In The Thumb

The better your website is designed, the easier it is for your consumers. 

Thumb-friendly navigation is one of those things that users don’t really think about, but is going to become absolutely fundamental the more that we move into faster, more responsive mobile-first -pages. 

This also opens up the option for different scroll patterns. The web has no longer been designed solely for a mouse and a computer for over a decade, but gesture control will likely come into its own in 2022. 

Talk Out Loud

Voice-search is on the rise, and web design has to keep up. With more and more searches conducted through voice every day, it’ll be interesting to see how web design can subsume voice chatbots and virtual assistants into a part of the overall approach to web design, and what that’s going to mean in the future. 

Sorina’s prediction: more websites will integrate voice search as an alternative to traditional text search, which will also make these websites more accessible. 

90s, Baby

There’s always a place for nostalgia, and in 2022, that place is going to be the internet. With the youngest 90s baby now 22 years old, the early internet aesthetic is going to reign supreme in 2022 as actual 90s kids turn their love of nostalgia into the place where they used to spend all their time: the internet, and all its neon popup glory. Add in the popularity of lo-fi music and the TikTok filter machine, and the 90s are on their way back to the web in a big way. 

Google’s Page Experience Update

According to Andrea, this is something that’s been in the works since the internet was – and it’s finally being formalised. 

And it’s a good thing. 

The Google Page Experience update has changed the way Google’s engines parse web pages, helping them load faster and better. With an improved page experience and a quick loading time, it changes the way designers have to approach a web page. 

Websites that look beautiful but have elements that stutter or skip break the immersion of that web-page. Similarly, websites that load well but have elements that don’t look good won’t hold your attention.

Andrea says, “this is really going to positively challenge designers to be as brutal in their approach as possible. For all its openness when compared to print, web does have an interesting set of core ideals or limitations that, so far, we’ve been pretty free and relaxed about. Something as simple as keeping your choices minimal but cohesive, throughout web projects is an obvious but important start, but this puts more of an engineering spin on web design than anything else – it’s got to look great and work greater. We need to design with the end experience in mind, not just ‘does it look good’ but ‘do I even know that I’m on a website.’ If the experience is uninterrupted through smart design, users will end up having better experiences.”

What Are they Going to Look Like: Web Design Trends 2022

It’s important to keep in mind that these changes aren’t happening just because designers got bored with the last set of trends, or because last year’s trends no longer apply. We’re nearing a complete change in how the web works. 

In some aspects, that change has already happened. Blockchain, bitcoin, NFTs, metaverses, entertainment over anything else: this is new. 

And designers have to work with it. 

We talked about the why. 

Here’s the how.

One-Page Age

Lockdown made the world a lot smaller. Overnight, you couldn’t travel. You had to stay indoors. You couldn’t attend events you’d been looking forward to or engage in different experiences. 

Those limitations keep coming and going, and will for a while. 

One page websites are here to make the best of the bad.

By containing everything to one interactive webpage, the experience of doing something, of being somewhere, is maximised: there’s no burger menu to take you out of it or traditional page set-up to remind you you’re on a website. All you need to do is go onto the homepage, access the article, find the micro-site, and scroll through the story. 

Animated in-text elements, tiny animations, and incredible visual design are the cornerstones. 

The heart is the immersion.

Point-and-Click Panorama

Do you miss the old internet design?

Well, good news: it’s on the up. It’s been on the up since 2021, but 2022 is going to bring the 90s point-and-click nostalgia back to the forefront. 

Nostalgia sells. 

It always has.

But this is deeper than nostalgia. 

Before the web was standardised, social-media-ised, or (barely) sanitised, web design was full of easter eggs and HTML coding tricks and figuring out new ways to apply the same three elements in different configurations. Community efforts to create websites that worked beautifully and had little tricks in them for users to discover were what you did on the internet way back. 

People are tired, and they’re tired of websites that exist just to sell a product. Websites that can incorporate some of the joy of logging into the internet in the 90s and winding up in a coding rabbit-hole are going to see the effort pay off beautifully. As people strive to find connection in a time when connection is especially important, and increasingly difficult to create, giving them a talking point and a no-strings-attached adventure is an excellent way to keep them coming back because they want to.

Bespoke Page View

Some people like to read their articles in dark mode. Some people don’t. 

In 2022, those design choices are going to become a facet of every web design plan. Right now, tailoring things to specifications – smaller text, bigger text, different colours, dark mode, light mode – is prevalent in everything from apps to mobile devices. It’s going to extend to web as a matter of course. 

Tailoring a site to fit personal specifications builds a connection, and opens up the accessibility of the website to everyone. We’re looking at an age where humans want the choice to change things – not because they specifically need it, but because it’s more comfortable to. 

Mise En Place

In the age of Zoom calls and house tours and vlogs, something stands out. 

People are really curious about other people. 

Websites can leverage this. 

Design that gives more sense of place. Images that identify who’s who and what they like. 

Design that puts the humans behind it at the front and centre, and build a sense of trust between the people on the website and the people who designed it. 

And with that trust comes connection. 

As we’ve said above, connection is critical – even more so now than it ever was. 2019 and 2020 showed the global population what isolation felt like. 

It isn’t surprising that nobody wants to go back to that state of being. 

Positively Positive

We could all use a little bit of good news with the bad. 

Going into 2022, websites will lean into the positive. Light, bright colours, upbeat music, an emphasis on the happier side of things. 

It’s not just altruism.

There’s enough bad news to go around. People are tired of hearing about it, of getting bombarded with reasons to worry, of feeling stressed and sad and lonely. Websites that can add back a little happiness, and build a connection with their viewers, are going to feel the uptick in traffic. 

Micro Movements

There’s a lot on the web that’s interesting. 

So much so that websites can struggle to keep their audiences right where they need them, especially for longform content. 

Tiny animations can help keep the brain grounded to your page. Tiny animations throughout a piece of longform content help keep people engaged. 

We get it. There’s so much to keep in mind already that long-form content and static web pages seem like an extra effort. Tiny animations are a middle-ground: emphasising content, without losing the attention of a frazzled audience. 

Designer’s Dream

Static images aren’t out. 

But there’s going to be less of them around. 

Design elements are on the up for 2022, with websites opting for less in stock photos and more in custom design that really puts your personality where your site (or social media!) is. This trend is also capitalising on something we’ve noticed overall in human behaviour: the sudden shift towards hyper-custom, hyper-personalised content and design that’s built to stand out above what’s been popular for the last ten years. 

Andrea pinpoints a few that he considers will have a bigger emphasis on the way web design is approached in 2022. 

Art Deco Double

The Art Deco revival really started a year ago, but we haven’t seen the full limits of what it’s capable of until now. According to Andrea, Art Deco is an excellent trend for 2022 and the rise of personalised content due to the minimalism that drives it. With a fundamentally simple design, Art Deco can be both contemporary and classic, and suit multiple different materials, mediums, and brand needs. 

Textual Feeling

Part accessibility, part style choice, web design is going to go all out on text with large, bold titles and micro messaging. Andrea suggests we’ll see large copy especially in tandem with bright visuals and scrollable interfaces as brands build stories told exclusively via movement. 

Linework Love

We’ve seen this trend before. It’s one of those things that just keeps popping in and out of style, but Andrea’s predicting a sudden surge for linework for 2022 as users are given more control over how to approach design. Andrea says, “think of it like a colouring book – the basic elements are there, but users can fill in the gaps with their own styles and experiences. It is also a great graphic style that allows designers to lay out flowing information without needing to default to endless columns of text.”

Going Forward

As the years roll on and the idea of web design moves from an idea to an entrenched discipline, it’s interesting to see how changes happen, and how close they are aesthetically to Web 1.0. 

From minimalist text to just-because-I-felt-like-it font choice, the internet has come full circle. We’re back to the era of early internet exploration, of creating websites that look and work beautifully just for the hell of it, of working together with some of the biggest technologies to create an experience. 

2022 is going to be a lot of things, and boring is not going to be one of them. We’re looking at a web gone more accessible, louder, more customisable, more easy to adapt to. 

It’s going to change everything. 

And we can’t wait to get our hands on it. 

Want to read more marketing trends for 2022?

Here are a few more resources we’ve put together, with more on the way:

SEO Trends 2022: More Human

Marketing Trends 2022: The Year of Conflict

Seven Regional Marketing Trends We Want To See More Of

Social Media Trends 2022: The Year of More

B2B Marketing Trends 2022

The post Web Design Trends 2022 appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

There is so much accessibility, functionality, and easy-to-understand usability in Facebook that it rendered websites for brands a little bit obsolete. Virtually everything you can do on a brand’s webpage can be recreated, faster, on Facebook: there’s no need for a domain, no need to pay a web designer to design your page, and no need to encourage people to click four or five extra times to get what they need.

More importantly, that’s where the people are. 

Facebook gives you a page. 

You populate it with things for sale, brand values, and contact information. 

Your audience, who is likely already on Facebook, takes it from there. 

Easy. 

However, as with most things during 2020, the pandemic brought Facebook’s physical limitations forward. 

Brands sought out different platforms for virtual experiences that went beyond the function-first approach of Facebook and other socials. 

Zoom. Hangouts. Houseparty. 

The difficulties of hosting virtual events on an ephemeral platform are obvious. What people needed was different to a social media platform, or a way of communicating. They needed a whole world. 

Enter, the website. 

Websites: A Functional Explanation

In the absence of other things – going outside, meeting friends, travelling, anything that has to do with people – websites have stepped in to give people a taste of the possibilities of indoor experiences. Some websites have made themselves into virtual cities and stalls. Others are built around gamification. Even more others change frequently, not just the design, but also the functionality. 

For people whose primary internet usage for the past seven years has been Facebook, the possibilities of websites has more than tripled what they can do on the internet. Not to mention, it’s also shown them something that is easily forgotten: the possibility of web design itself. 

In the early days of web design, it was all about what you could do with this new technology. As we became more familiar with it, websites grew sleeker and more sparse. Doing things ‘just because’ gave way to doing things in a way that would maximise profitability. 

The internet grew up. 

Web Design 2021

And then COVID-19 happened. 

Facebook and other socials started to struggle. 

And the web slid back a few years. 

Right now, we’re in the midst of a 90s resurgence. Nostalgia is a powerful incentive in any case, but coupled with what’s happening around us in 2021, no wonder people want escapism in any way they can find it. 

Web is an excellent way to provide that escapism, and talk about your brand. 

Why Web?

Web is really the only medium where brands can directly interact with their fans, and one of the only mediums where they can have a little fun. With a captive audience desperate for any sort of engagement, this is an excellent opportunity to capitalise on the current situation and create brand design that really stands out. 

More importantly, that entertains and informs. 

With websites, a key facet of design is that you need to reward people for taking the time to visit your web-page, particularly if there’s no reason for them to do so. Web allows an opportunity to engage with and explore the brand without the pressure to purchase, and the space to take in a different side of the brand. 

Any side of the brand. 

Web in 2021 is a blank slate. Everything else on the web is so structured – so Facebookized – that the slightest step out of the norm feels like a big luxury, something that comes around only rarely. 

Tips for Web Design in 2021

• Maximise every aspect of the browser. From customised messages in the tabs to hidden links, good web design can create a miniature world on the web that allows deeper access to your brand than a Facebook page or a simple brand page. 
• Experiment. With web design, nothing is forever unless you want it to be. Print campaigns and newspapers are permanent; web design is fluid, and can be done just ‘for fun’ without the risk that, ten years from now, it’ll be dated.
• React, interact, act. Websites allow you to use aspects of your brand voice that could go unheard in Facebook or a corporate website. Allowing your brand’s personality to shine through can help hold your audience’s attention. They’ll remember a fun web-page that they spent a few minutes on. 
• Design to brand. Use hidden links and easter eggs if you have to, but bring your brand’s personality and voice forward through every part of the design. 

This isn’t to say these are the only tips, or that Facebook cauterised web design. 

It’s the opposite. In the 15 – 20 years of the internet, we’ve honed and created a way of displaying information and an easily-understood visual language that is almost universally recreated. Now that the mold has been set, it’s the perfect time to break it, stand out, and speak above the crowd. 

What’s next for websites post-pandemic?

There are people who might say that the age of the website will end when lockdown does. 

That isn’t strictly true. 

While websites might experience a dip in their newfound popularity, they won’t go back to pre-pandemic levels if a website is done well. With web, there are no real limitations on what you can do. 

Put simply: 

You can sell a pair of shoes on Facebook. 

But to make people drool over your shoes, allow them to try them on virtually, make shoe-shopping fun, you need a website. The web, as they say, is forever. 

The post Facebook Killed Website Design appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

This had happened for a very simple reason. Facebook was eating up all internet traffic and it had become pretty superfluous to put time and effort behind a site. To make matters worse, Facebook was giving away a lot of free traffic, too, so brands could be found more easily on Facebook organically than they could on Google.

This made the need for sites nearly redundant, because even if you had a great site (and more so if you were a B2C brand), your site was not going to get that much traffic. People would even initiate most searches on Facebook, and even when they didn’t, your Facebook page would probably rank even higher than your own site on Google.

But times have changed. Facebook has stopped giving any real organic traffic, and now the only way to be seen by a good number of your customers on the platform is if you pay for the privilege.

Even when you do pay for the visibility you’re hampered by all the limitations of the platform, and you’re still showing your content on a site that’s doing its best to keep people on it. Your site, on the other hand, can be built in a way that works for your business, not Mark Zuckerberg’s. He’s rich enough.

So what should you do? You should build a site that’s at the centre of your communication efforts. You should, if I may say so myself, work with an agency like ours, one that understands what all your messaging is and then finds a way of displaying it conveniently for your audiences.

I’m going to be very kind and assume that anyone you work with will get the technical side of things correct. It’s a long shot, I know, but there’s a ton of great resources to cover that. If you need one you can see the ultimate web design checklist that covers it all. No use reinventing the wheel.

What I’d like to cover today is the high level plan of the site, the part that is much more about communications than about the actual nuts and bolts of the site. Anyone can get that right. 

From a content and structure point of view, a good web design and development agency, or a good web planner, will understand that any website should:

Be built to convert.

The website should be built to convert your visitors somehow or other, either into customers, into leads, into sales, or into fans. You should never waste traffic. Build a plan for every kind of visitor that you get and make it a point to have a goal (or multiple goals) for each. You won’t hit that goal with every visitor, but I can guarantee you that you will not hit a single goal that you don’t set. If you’re selling online, for example, then your primary target will be to close a sale, but if your visitor is not ready to purchase then you should at least get them to give you an email address or to share a product. Failing that you can place them into a bucket to hit them again with advertising at a later  

Cater for your different audiences.

While also making it seamless for them to navigate through. Some people will land on your site because they are ready to buy, others are there to research a product or solution that you offer. Make it easy for clients to choose where they want to go, and lat your site out in a way that will solve your visitors’ problems without creating new ones for them.

Host your content in a way that’s easy to browse and share.

It’s all well and good if your site looks incredibly sexy from miles away, but if the experience is frustrating for users, then it’s not really fulfilling its function. Some people are awestruck by inspirational experiences, and if that’s what you’re aiming for, then you should excel at it, but don’t play around with fancy stuff if you’re giving your audience a 5,000 word blog post to read. Just give them the text and informative images.

Tell your visitors about you, who you are, what you stand for.

It might sound obvious, but make it easy for your visitors to find out who you are and what drives you. If people find it hard to learn about who’s behind a brand, or at least why the brand exists, then they’ll have trouble trusting it.

Act as an extension to your social media activity.

Your website should include versions of the content that you create for social media. I’m not saying that you should have a feed that automatically pulls posts from your Facebook feed, that’s lazy, but you should make it a point to keep your website as updated as you would update your Facebook or LinkedIn profiles. But the medium is different, so make it a point to create content that makes sense in the context of a site.

Once we’ve established some of the key elements that need to go into a great site for the roaring 20s, I think that it’s time to see how we will get there. It’s not as hard as it might seem, all it needs is a bit of thought before we get started.

In order to do this you need to start off your planning before you start designing and developing, and you should work on a strategy for your site that will tie down:

• Your audiences
• Your goals (for each audience, if they differ)
• Where you’re going to get your traffic from
• What you’re going to do with your traffic
• What behaviour you’re expecting from your visitors

And in the end…

Websites are here to stay. They’re more important than ever, and you need to work with a good partner to get yours right. A good website will give you control over your narrative and will help you stand out from the crowd. If you want to have a chat about your next site, feel free to get in touch, we’d love to help you. 

The post How a great web development agency can build a site as the centre of your communications appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

For a lot of brands, it’s the only form of storytelling they can have a little fun with. From glitchy graphics to hidden links to slow-scrolling pictures, web design enhances what’s good about your brand to mythic proportions. It’s the Willy Wonka method of storytelling, everything bigger and brighter and more beautiful. 

In 2021, web design isn’t just storytelling; it’s crucial storytelling. Without a good website now, the losses aren’t even calculable. 

And that’s without taking into account the fact that without a website, your brand might not exist on the greater planes of the web. 

So. 

Let’s talk about web design. 

The State of Web in 2021

As with most trends, what happens on the web starts out in real life. 

What happened in real life is this: people stayed indoors. Mobile phone users glued themselves to their phones. Internet usage skyrocketed. 

Websites ruled. 

In Malta alone, 91% of the country was online by January 2020. It’s estimated that, during COVID-19, internet usage increased to 100% in countries most afflicted by it – think Italy, the United States, even Malta. Online traffic surged. 

Globally, transactions online increased 39.7% from January 2020 to January 2021. Global conversion rates increased by 40.3% for the same time period. 

Everywhere, everyone, was online. 

Which meant that everywhere, everyone, had something to say about web design. 

Web is the first impression your audience will get with your brand. Websites that load slowly, are difficult to access from mobile devices, or are just plain ugly are going to affect your brand’s reputation, even if you don’t know it. 

A negative review left on Facebook is bad. 

A person who clicks through your website and leaves without saying anything at all is worse. 

85% of B2B and 79% of B2C consumers put a lot of value into the experience they have with a brand. That includes their first impression of your website, and how easy it is to understand. 

Web Design 2021

Here’s what we’re seeing in Web Design for 2021. 

Silverscreen Life

Let’s face it: we’re unlikely to move past the pandemic in the next year or so. In the meantime, there’s been a resurface of digital events, digital experiences, and digital lives, from online lectures to virtual lives. 

Interactive websites can make the separation between virtual and IRL seamless. 

Do you remember the early internet? All those clickable, hidden links?

This is similar, though without the 90s pop-up ads. 

Think of clean, clear space and elaborate, moving visuals – parallax is making a comeback this year, and we’re a fan of it for clean websites that want enough animation to compel and hold the attention. 

Our tip: add animations. Animations help keep focus where static images struggle. The best of both worlds? Have a static image with some animation. Additionally, make sure your website can load up content fast – optimise it for that purpose. 

We See You

Seeing other humans has become a little more rare since the early days of lockdown. 

Is it any surprise that web design is suddenly, understandably, loaded up with images of humanity? Avatars, filters, memojis: human identity built to bridge a connection. Images of humans and personalised services bring the website back around to experience. 

The experience of your life, of how you look at the world, of how you understand. 

It builds connection. Seeing yourself reflected in images, your capabilities echoed in design, helps consumers feel like the brand considers them at all stages, not just to make purchases. It’s conversation and connection without being obvious.  

Dark mode or light? Colour or black and white? Larger text, smaller text?

Customisation features allows for audiences to really feel like the brand understands them, understands their needs, understands that sometimes they need text to be bigger or to have a different colour-palette for legibility. Each website a nest of interfaces. 

Each interface unique. 

Our tip: don’t skimp on accessibility. More people than you know struggle to read tiny text, tell colours apart, or to manoeuvre around a factory-built website. Give your audience as many ways of customising it as is possible, and remember that most of your consumers will be accessing your website through their phones or tablets. 

Remember When…?

We’ve been writing a lot about nostalgia recently, and with good reason. From clothing to web design, 2021’s bringing nostalgia back. 

In web design for 2021, this means tactile response. It means a physical moment made virtual. Web pages will scroll, turn, twist, move, just like the pages of a magazine, a leaf of postcards, a selection of notebook doodles. Websites look lived in and used and heavy. 

Websites are interactive. With so much of our lives conducted virtually, this interactivity, this physicality, helps connect a user to the moment. They’ll remember it. 

They’ll want to relive it. 

Forget the sleek, flat, 2020 gloss. 2021 is all about the heavy physicality of the past, ‘60s curves, ‘70s patterns and ‘80s colours.  

Our tip: What’s your favourite nostalgic memory? Is it the glitchy spatiality of Windows ‘95, or the sweepy, flowery patterns of ‘70s mandalas? Add that into your website – as text, as a graphic, as a hidden link. Nostalgia makes people feel better, think back to a better time. Happier consumers are more likely to remember you when they’re in a position to buy something.

Design With Purpose

There’s been a lot in the news lately about historical moments. We’re living through something that is going to be taught in schools, immortalised in memoirs, and taken apart by university graduates. What history is going to remember is who helped, who hindered, and who watched. 

Companies are expected to be the helpers. 

Brands are expected to talk about social issues. Audience loyalty, especially now, is a fickle thing to hold: with so many companies talking so much about so many things, it’s easy to switch to a company that better holds your values. We’ve spoken about this before, and we’ll continue to say it – your best supporter is always going to be who you cultivate. 

Web design in 2021 puts your loyalties at the centre. 

You have to talk about what you support. Sustainability? Community responsibility? Put it in there. Dig through your archives to showcase the diversity of your customers. Add a graphic to talk about burnout. Your audience wants to know that you care. 

In 2021, it’s fundamental that you do. 

Our tip: you have to have an initiative you’re proud of. Maybe you boosted your employees’ wages when so many other companies slashed them. Maybe you switched to environmentally-friendly packaging. Find your pride, and put it where people can see it. 

Softer, Soothing, Supportive

From gentle colours to feel-good news, web design in 2021 wants to uplift. 

This means a call back to simplicity. Clean lines. Pastels bleeding into one another. Colours. Whimsical type. 

Whereas 2019 was all about the corporate, the glossy, glassy, smooth, professional web, 2021 is about softness and feeling good and design that makes you happy. 

Our tip: Play around with colours, shapes, and text. We’ve had our fill of professional blue, corporate grey, and gentle beige. A pop of colour, a curlier text, can help liven up a corporate website – and show your brand’s personality a little better. 

Statistics for Web in 2021

We don’t like telling you what to do without backing it up with facts. 

Here are a few to get you started. 

• 55.64% of internet users come from mobile devices. 
• 68% of consumers expect better from businesses when it comes to digital capabilities. 
• 94% of people notice the appearance of a website first, and make the decision whether or not to continue using it on that appearance.
• People make up their minds about a website within 50 milliseconds. 
• Websites that take longer than 2 seconds to load abandon the website 38% of the time. 
• 48% of people decide a business’ credibility based on their website design. 
• 85% of users believe a mobile website should be as good or better than the desktop version. 

Web Design Going Forwards

We’ve made a lot of changes in the year and a half of the pandemic. 

Only some of it is internal. 

The rest is external: in the way we run our social media apps, the way we talk to each other online, the way everything looks. From sleek, flat, angular design, we’ve gone for softer curves, brighter colours, and better usability. As more of our lives become entwined with online, this is not likely to change. 

If anything, it’s going to become more important. Web is never going to be the same as it was before 2019. 

Neither are we. 

So hit the ground running, and get ready for the future.

And speak to us if you want to take this journey with us.

The post Web Design in 2021: Where We Were, Where We Are, Where We’re Going appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

Innovation does not need to be disruptive. It just needs to be timely.

So we’ve taken our eCommerce pricing model and transformed it for the times.

We’ve eliminated all up front costs, and we’re only charging a percentage of your eCommerce sales in exchange for:

• marketing your eCommerce efforts,
• building and running your site.

We’ll also sort you out for deliveries.

Could it be easier? Could it be fairer?

Stop trying to figure it out yourself. Speak to us now.

Let’s do this.

[contact-form-7]

The post An online store, up in days, zero upfront costs. appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

1. Warm Up

Get to know your client. Ask a few general questions to make sure that you are both on the same page regarding tastes, objectives and target audience. Prepare a moodboard and share it with the client to get visual buy-in, too.

2. Show them the light

Give them an idea of the milestones for the entire project, in this way they won’t be in the dark and won’t feel the need to bombard your inbox 3 times a week (or a day if you’re unlucky). Planning and proposing everything to the client before the project begins saves a lot of time later on in the journey. So yes, a lot of time is spent getting organised, but it’s essential, and it’s basically a win-win situation. Once all the cards are on the table you’re ready to begin. Let’s do this!

3. Jump the gun

Yes, in my position, I would have my own milestones set ahead of time. Prepare. Brace yourself. Problems, unexpected problems, will occur. Keeping some boundary time between milestones helps me to keep the whole project on track as much as possible. At times it helps, other times it just causes more and more delays. Having everything planned ahead of time will avoid encountering major meltdowns half way through the process. Nobody likes a zombie project.
Incidentally, you might want to put a project management software in place. BeeWits (our very own tool!), Trello or Asana are also great alternatives.

4. ChChCh-Changes

This is my favourite – in every project, no matter how much you plan ahead, there will always be changes. Changes to improve the user experience or just simple changes from the client’s end. This is understandable, and so it’s something I always allocate some time for in the planning process. Everybody has his own way of imagining things, so when one sees it visually, it might not look as appealing as they had imagined it to be. This could be one of the hardest stages since at the end of the day you would like to make your client happy, but sometimes you just need to slowly back off.

5. Test. Test. Keep Testing

No matter how many times you test a website before going live, something always seems to break. So keep testing and get other people in the office to test it out too. Everybody will pinpoint out something which slipped your mind, especially if the project has been going on for months, you basically become visually impaired to the obvious. Apart from that this is a great exercise to have the office informed of what you’re up to! Monitoring will continue going even after you launch, you can never trust what’s out there.

6. Launch? Now?!

Clients will chase you, and will ask how things are and when they’ll be done. Hopefully you’ve tested enough for the site to go live, and you’ve sent a  preview of the test site which was approved by the client (make sure they love it). Once that’s done…it’s time to launch their baby. Are the developers around? Yes. Are they available for a few hours? Yes. Hosting? Check. Is it Friday? Nope! (damn). You should never launch on a Friday, the people you will need might not be around over the weekend if hell breaks loose.

7. Show Time!

Fingers crossed, that everything goes well. When moving a site from the test platform to the actual domain you might end up breaking elements, so your developer needs to be there holding your hand, hoping everything will move in one piece.

Once this is done you just need some polishing up of bits and pieces but these will only be little tweaks which will make everyone look good at the end of it all.
And yes! One more project crossed off my to-do list. Until the process starts all over again.
So yeah, apart from having fun, this is what I do at work… Hot chocolate Richard?

The post Ready for take off – Seeing projects through to the end appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

First off – how will this affect you?

This depends on your answer to the next question:

Is your site mobile friendly?

If you’re not really sure, then you can check out what Google itself thinks. Just insert your website’s address here and you’ll learn soon enough.There’s no ranking, your site either passes the test or it fails it.
Passed the test? Then this is good news for you. You now have an advantage over people whose sites fail the test on mobile searches. Failed? Going forward, when people use mobile phones to search for keywords that you ranked well on previously, your site’s ranking will drop down the rankings.

Why should I care?

These two (identical) statistics should make you care:

• Up to 80% of Internet users use smartphones to search.
• 80% of local searches that originate on mobiles result in a conversion.

With numbers like these, the only thing that remains surprising is why not more people are putting a bigger effort into making their website mobile-friendly.

What should I do?

Simple – if you don’t have a mobile-friendly site, then get in touch with your favourite web design agency (us, quite naturally) and get us working on a site immediately. If you’re not quite ready for that, the least you can do is start creating some new pages that are mobile-friendly. The ranking is based on pages, not whole sites, so this way you can start winning Google over on your new content.

The post FAQ special – Is your site ready for Google's biggest update in years? appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

• I could build a landing page with the advantages of buying fruit and veg in bulk from my store for chefs – indicating how my prices are competitive for business to business sales.
• My next landing page would target people who are after a healthier lifestyle. I could extoll the virtues of eating fresh produce. This page will also highlight the fact that I’m sourcing greens from local farmers.
• My final landing page would be aimed at party-goers who are looking for the only source of fresh lime in the area. This would be a page giving various Mojito recipes and promising a free sprig of fresh mint with every lime bought, only as long as you mentioned that you were buying the lime for mojitos.

So now that we’ve understood why we need landing pages, we need to try understanding what helps make ones that work better.

Set your marketing goal

Before you can even start planning what you want your landing page to look and feel like, you need to have a marketing goal set in your mind. It is imperative that you stick to one particular aim and resist the temptation to try solving more than one issue at once.
Remember, the whole point of going down the landing page route is to gain an advantage over the rest of your site by being specific, so don’t try to cram more than one goal. You can’t build a landing page that will gather data, sell, go viral and clean your dog’s droppings.

Choose an action

Once you have a marketing goal in mind, you need to translate it into an action that visitors can take once they arrive on your landing page. Copyblogger quotes Seth Godin’s five courses of action that can be offered to people who arrive at your marketing materials online:

1. Get a visitor to click to go to another page
2. Get a visitor to buy
3. Get a visitor to give permission for you to follow up by email, phone, etc.
4. Get a visitor to tell a friend
5. Get a visitor to comment or give you some sort of feedback

Identify the benefits for your visitors

Most traditional marketing focuses on features. It is quite understandable – the go-to source of knowledge usually lies within product development, so it’s natural for them to flaunt their feature-set.
Buyers, however, only really delve into features when they’re in a far more advanced stage of the purchase life-cycle – essentially when they’re choosing between a small set of products they’ve identified as potential choices.
Before then, all they’re really interested in is how the product or service is going to make their life better, ideally in a tangible way. Sometimes your list of benefits needs to sell the need of the product itself – so our friendly green grocer might want to show the advantages of living a healthy lifestyle in order to drive more traffic into his store.
If, on the other hand, the fruit and veg man was operating in an area where people are generally health conscious, then he’s probably competing with quite a few other similar businesses, so the benefits he has to highlight are specific to his place and the produce he’s selling.

Stick to the message

The big difference between a landing page and a regular website is that you are allowed to be far more specific on landing pages. If you have a hundred products or services, this is not the place to be shouting about them.
People came to this landing page for one specific reason. If you’re doing your job well enough, people came to this landing page from one specific source. So make sure that all you do is make it clear that you’re there to help them solve that specific need. Landing pages are not the place for cross-sell (unless cross-selling is your only aim for the landing page).
If we built a landing page for party-goers, convincing them that we’re the best source for lime and mint to base their Mojitos on, then there is absolutely no value in extolling the virtues of living a healthier lifestyle or losing weight. They’re not here for that, so don’t distract them from their main aim. Make the best of the few seconds you manage to get their attention for and get them to order their mint and lime.

Write clear and concise copy

People are busy. People are very easily distracted.
Keep your paragraphs short and your sentences even shorter. If you can get away with one sentence instead of two, do so. If you can get away without any body copy at all, then by all means go for it.
This will obviously depend on what you’re selling. Some products or services demand longer explanations and punters will demand reassurance, but always go through your copy and ensure that you’ve removed all the extra fluff.
Before you start, read The Elements of Style, by Strunk and White (first edition available for free here and the second here (PDF)) – you’ll get a lot out of it, but it is worth the read if only for this paragraph:

“Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.”

Reassure people that they’re making the right decision

Visitors to your landing page need to be reassured that they are in a place they can trust. And what better way to confirm this than by adding real-world testimonials, either from peers or from professionals.
If you can pull some words from a well-known and instantly recognisable review site, then definitely do so. We did this with the landing page for Corinthia Hotels recently, taking reviews from TripAdvisor and showing their (Excellent) rating amongst one of the first things on the page. This has a much higher impact on visitors than simply stating great things about your product yourself.
If you can use social proof, then do so too. There are many ways of inserting live information in your landing pages, maybe simply by showing how many people are actually on the page, how many people have used the service recently or just the number of followers you have on Facebook or Twitter. A Facebook Page Like box is great because it even shows which of your friends have already liked the page (and therefore your brand by extension).

Make it easy for people to take the right action

So now you have your goals set up and all your content written perfectly. People who get to your landing page are more likely to believe in your product or service because you’ve given them good reason to.
So what do they do next?
Their next step should be immediately clear. It should be very easy for them to take it, it must feel natural, and it should leave no doubt in their mind as to how the action should be taken.
You should have chosen your goal in the beginning, now’s the time to achieve it. If you want email subscriptions, then don’t put buttons all over the page asking people to buy your products (just in case they want to buy after all). You’ll confuse visitors and waste money on the traffic you generated to the landing page.
Keep any forms you place on the page short and to the point. Only gather the information you absolutely need from your clients – this is not the time to profile your visitors, this is the time to open a line of communication.
Test the page on people who have no idea what’s going on, see if they find it as obvious as you do what their next action is. Try asking people you know who are close to your target demographic – no use asking your tech-savvy colleagues to test a page if you’re aiming it at retirees.

Test, Measure, Tweak, Repeat

So now you have a landing page that’s done – time to go out and celebrate? Nope, I’m afraid not. This is when your hard work starts. Now you have to create multiple variants of your landing pages and start using them to slowly but steadily improve your numbers.
We’re back to our starting point – tweaking content. This, however, is where we change our content subtly depending on the source of our traffic. It has been proven that conversion rates improve if you use the same verbiage as people’s searches. Using the right keywords in landing pages also improves your relevance, and therefore gives you more brownie points with paid search traffic.
So test variations, measure their impact, teak your tests and repeat the process until you’re running a well oiled conversion machine. Good luck!
The screenshots below shows two examples of landing pages we did for APS Bank and Corinthia Hotel London.

 
Other examples:


Do you think that your business could benefit from better landing pages? Why not drop us a line at espresso@switch.com.mt to see how we can help you increase your online presence and ROI?

The post Creating the ideal landing page appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.