Thunderbolt Digital are a trusted Surrey web design agency that also offers a range of other professional online services including SEO, SEM, SMM, hosting, web development, and more. Web design is constantly evolving, and we often see a new set of trends and best practice each year but some sites don’t adapt to these changes and remain stuck in the past. A website that looks old and not at all up to date can really put off potential customers, so our Surrey web design team have put together a quick list of things to watch out for so you can stop your website from looking dated!
Flash Animation
Much of the web was build upon and around Adobe Flash, but it has fallen from favour amongst developers in the past few years due to a variety of problems including security concerns and negative SEO. Certain animations built with Flash can also look dated and unprofessional, so it’s best to just scrap them altogether. In fact, Google wants you to upgrade to HTML5 or suffer the consequences!
Fonts
A big design “don’t” is the use of too many fonts in one place, and web design is no exception to this; a mismatch of more than three fonts usually looks amateurish and makes your site feel dated. For a modern feel keep things simple, with a more distinctive font for specific things like headers, links or perhaps your tagline. To ensure that your site doesn’t look like it stepped straight out of 2003, make sure that you keep fonts like Comic Sans, Joker, Monotype Corsiva and Papyrus away from your text at all costs!
Images and Effects
Even smartphones can take high resolution, professional-looking pictures, so any low quality (or low resolution) images on your site either make you look unprofessional or as if you haven’t bothered to update things in quite a few years, and perhaps just don’t realise that mismatched stock photos just won’t fly anymore. Excessive use of textures, highlights and drop shadow (especially on navigation buttons) can also lead users of your site to the same conclusion.