WordPress continues to grow in popularity with over 74 million sites publishing new posts every second. WordPress is a favorite among business because it is powerful, customizable with multiple plugins and themes, easy to manage, and IT IS FREE! Gathering Waters uses WordPress almost exclusively because of the reasons listed and more. WordPress allows our clients to have a basic informational web site to a powerful e-commerce with customized functionality. All of this is available at a reasonable price and once the site is designed our clients can do their own content maintenance. WordPress plugins range from free introduction with basic functionality to highly customizable tools adding complex order processing. Examples of the more complex functionality are the membership and CEU courses on ptaonly.com, and the order processing and subscription e-commerce of organicmealslacrosse.com (Coming Soon).

For more information on the reasons to use WordPress as your web site content management system (CMS), read “25 Reasons Your Business Should Switch to WordPress” by JOHN RAMPTON, CONTRIBUTOR, Entrepreneur and Connector (http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/241535)

Material design is a concept Google introduced where they recommend colors, icons, typography, layouts, navigation and more. (http://material.google.com/) These standards are focused on three principles of good design: Material is the metaphor; Bold, graphic, intentional; and Motion means meaning. As with all marketing, your web sites should present a consistent image with a single system should provide a unified experience across all platforms including mobile, tablet and desktop. Material design discusses effective use of shadows, movement, color and depth to create designs that the user finds realistic, appealing and inviting.

Other trends in web design for 2016 are the emphasis on big imagery or Hero images. Images continue to be very important and can be crucial in keeping traffic on your site. We are a culture of few words/bullet points and lots of eye-candy. Short videos are a great way to incorporate more complex ideas along with imagery. A less than 3 minute video can introduce, explain and/or show your product or service in action. Vlogging continues to be very popular.

Thanks to the increased use of mobile phones for web browsing, we are now becoming more accepting of long scrolls. However you need to incorporate images and clear sections to lure a user through your story.

Landing pages are experiencing a comeback as SEO and Google AdWords continue to impress the importance of providing content that supports keywords in order to improve ranking of your page in organic searches and your advertisement in paid searches. We utilize landing pages on larger sites such as Kussmaul Seeds to help us capture traffic for our specific categories of corn seed such as Conventional Corn Seed.

Slideshows and galleries provide an effective way to combine the impact of large images with animation if you have multiple products or ideas that you wish to showcase to the visitor. We have successfully used slideshows  on the home page of Kussmaul Seeds to highlight the variety of seeds they have available.

Other design trends that are still around include responsive designs which increased in popularity with mobile devices. Responsive designs and minimalism are extremely complementary when dealing with varying screen sizes of our devices and speed issues.

All of these design trends and others are taken into consideration when Gathering Waters develops a web site. We continue to focus on the tried and true basics of a good plan and well-thought out web schematic or wire-frame. This along with the client’s goals for their web site and their target market drive the design and elements incorporated. When we have sites that require specific functionality, we develop the functionality first and then develop the design, imagery and structure to support the functionality.

To read more about the 2016 web design trends, here are a few articles we have found useful:

“WordPress & Web Design Trends In 2016 To Get Excited About”
by WPExplorer “From The Blog”

http://www.wpexplorer.com/wordpress-trends-2016/

“6 Web Design Trends You Must Know for 2015 & 2016”
by September 16 By jerrycao In Web Design

Trends in web design come and go.

http://www.awwwards.com/6-web-design-trends-you-must-know-for-2015-2016.html