Web Trends 2023
User behaviour is constantly changing and marketers have to adapt to new user behaviours to ensure their marketing is reaching the correct demographic. See below for the web trends of 2023.
Inclusive Design
Websites should be designed to provide a seamless experience for every person that visits your site. By taking each user’s perspectives, characters, backgrounds, and experiences such as age, gender, language, culture, etc you can adapt your website design to cater for their needs. Your site should be approachable with carefully crafted text in your UI to assist with navigating your site. More flexible features such as allowing users to choose between dark and light modes, text sizes keyboard access, and audio transcripts will help improve the accessibility of your site.
People First Content for SEO
Websites often word content to improve a website’s search engine ranking and improving visibility. Many content strategists often adjust information to enhance search engine results ranking. Manipulating content tends to do more harm than good to the website when it comes to organic SEO. Google has changed their ranking system to prioritise original, helpful, and relevant information to users. Creating content that will be helpful to users will improve organic SEO therefore your website ranking.
Geolocation and Browser-Based Content (Personalisation)
Users will often revisit a website for a few hours or days and often see new content. New customised content can help increase user engagement with the website. Businesses can display dynamic content according to the user's location or browsing history and not generic content that was made to serve everyone. Users that have already viewed a product range will see the product or related products on their next visit. Businesses can use dynamic content to push their customers further along the customer journey.
Smart Video
Videos are engaging and can be the most effective online marketing tool. While having a video on a page is great, they need to be thought out. Smart videos are videos with a purpose and meaning. The days of having YouTube-embedded videos on your site to have one are gone. Embedding one well-thought-out, high-quality full HD video is better than a dozen poor-quality created videos. The video will need to be short and eye-catching to introduce your brand.
Thumb-Friendly Mobile Navigation
Building a mobile-friendly design is the basic fundamental of web design. As smartphones start to have 5G built into them, users will be able to access more interactive websites due to the improved speeds of 5G. Smartphones over the years have increased in screen real estate to improve content view experience. You may have found recently that you find it difficult to navigate your smartphone on bigger screens such as reaching for the address bar at the top of the screen or closing a tab. Google, Samsung and Apple have adjusted their applications to be thumb-friendly. For example, Apple has by default moved the address bar in the Safari app to the bottom. This allows users to reach the address bar with ease and go back to the previous page. Samsung over the years with One UI has fully adapted there Android UI to improve the thumb-friendly experience.
Website Speed Performance / Smart Content Loading
Page loading speed has been an important factor for web design and SEO for many years now. There are many methods to help reduce page loading times such as loading content when the user reaches it rather than loading the entire page. Users do not like to wait for a page to load as often users like to get the information they are looking for quickly. It is best to only display content that is relevant to the user and ensure all images are compressed to reduce the file weight. Another way to reduce loading time is to remove any unwanted HTML, CSS and JavaScript codes so only the necessary code Is loaded.
Integration of Social Media
User-generated content can help users relate to the brand. Connecting customers through social media channels such as putting Instagram feeds on a product page can benefit the brand and product. Integrating social media channels can provide users confidence in the product and inspire the customer to buy the product. User-generated content provides free authentic feedback from past customers which will always beat stock images created by marketing agencies.
Cross-Device User Experience
Users today have access to multiple devices such as laptops and smartphones. Users can start their initial browsing experience on the smartphone and then later in the day visit the site again on the desktop. For example, Netflix can be accessed on mobile apps, laptops, desktops, and smart television. The experience between all devices is consistent so the user experience is consistent and the messaging remains the same no matter what type of device the user uses. Users can continue to watch the start video from the point they have stopped when watching on another device. Creating an experience that enables users to carry on where they left off can help eliminate a pain point for users that use multiple devices. Apple devices can transfer the website you are viewing on your iPhone to your Macbook without losing the page you are on.
