2013 Web Design Trends that Affect Brand Image

Does your web design appropriately reflect your brand image? Is your web design leveraging the most current technologies and trends? Enfuzed put together an infographic (shown below) that details the hottest web design trends of 2013. Take a look and see if your web design is in need of an update.

Of course, there is more to web design for brand building than being trendy. With that in mind, simply chasing the web design trends depicted in the infographic below might not be the right strategy for your brand.

Brands are unique and the best brands understand their audience. In other words, trends shouldn’t be prioritized over usability, because a website that’s confusing to consumers spills over to brand confusion. Knowing that brand confusion is the number one brand killer, you need to create a web design that offers the best balance between design and function so users’ expectations for your brand experiences are always met.

Consumers build brands, not companies and not websites. A trendy website might win some awards, but it might not win enough customers. Which matters at the end of the day?

With all of that said, the infographic below highlights some fantastic web design trends that can have a positive impact on your brand building efforts. For example, responsive design is becoming more and more popular as a way to create amazing user experiences across devices at a fraction of the cost that stand-alone mobile apps provide. Even Google has publicly acknowledged its preference for indexing responsive websites over mobile sites.

Another trend, infinite scrolling, is getting mixed results from users and should be tested before fully implementing it on a brand website. With infinite scrolling, new content keeps displaying as a visitor scrolls down the page in an infinite manner. In other words, it’s impossible to get to the footer, and that’s a design trend that many internet users aren’t accustomed to yet. Therefore, it can create a negative user experience which will reflect negatively on your brand.

On the other hand, the fixed header trend, where the header with navigation always appears at the top of the browser window as the visitor scrolls down the page, is being met with a very positive response from internet users. A fixed header saves visitors time because they can navigate from one page of your brand website to another without having to scroll back to the top of the page. This feature enhances the user experience and subconsciously improves users’ perceptions of your brand.

You can see all of the web design trends for 2013 in the infographic below.

Author

Susan Gunelius

Website

Susan Gunelius is the author of 10 marketing, social media, branding, copywriting, and technology books, and she is President & CEO of KeySplash Creative, Inc., a marketing communications company. She also owns Women on Business, an award-wining blog for business women. She is a featured columnist for Entrepreneur.com and Forbes.com, and her marketing-related articles have appeared on websites such as MSNBC.com, BusinessWeek.com, TodayShow.com, and more.

She has over 20 years of experience in the marketing field having spent the first decade of her career directing marketing programs for some of the largest companies in the world, including divisions of AT&T and HSBC. Today, her clients include large and small companies around the world and household brands like Citigroup, Cox Communications, Intuit, and more. Susan is frequently interviewed about marketing and branding by television, radio, print, and online media organizations, and she speaks about these topics at events around the world. You can connect with her on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or Google+.