5 Web Design Tricks and Trends

---

The internet is a constantly evolving medium and can be very difficult to predict what the next big online sensation will be – who would have thought 10 years ago that online social media giants such as Facebook, Twitter and Youtube could become ...

The internet is a constantly evolving medium and can be very difficult to predict what the next big online sensation will be – who would have thought 10 years ago that online social media giants such as Facebook, Twitter and Youtube could become household names?

What can be just as difficult is predicting what the next big web design trends will be. Despite the demanding challenge, we’re going to run through some predictions of up and coming online tricks and design trends which are coming soon to a website near you…

Meet The MEGA-Menu

---

There’s a new type of drop-down menu in town – The Mega Menu. This new type of navigation works similarly to existing drop-down menus, but as its name would suggest – they’re much bigger in size.

Despite the menu being larger, mega-menus provide more benefits than just the space that they allow for additional page links, they provide an easier and more structured user experience for navigating websites with the ability to group links under more specific categories or associate graphics and icons with links to grab the users attention.

Early test results have reported that Mega Menus are slightly more effective than standard drop-downs when it comes to driving clicks further down into the content pages of your site. Partly because of this fact – they have become increasingly popular since they started to appear in early 2009.

Some sites which utilise mega-menus include: www.audi.com and www.foodnetwork.com.

Cu3er

---

Cu3er (Cuber) is a new flash based slideshow/gallery component that allows easy customisation to present your own images and match your website look and feel. What’s so special about that you ask? Cu3er adds a new dimension with a wide range of amazing 3D transitions to spruce up the look of your website homepage or gallery pages.

Like some other slideshows, cu3er allows the ability to add descriptions to images and buttons to navigate between slides. You can also set which specific type of transition you would like between particular slides as well as set how much time you would like to set between transitions.

The first official version of Cu3er is yet to be released which promises more transitions and features to boot. To see an example of cu3er, go to: www.progressivered.com/cu3er.

Living Large

---

Continuing on from mega menus earlier, we move on to what seems to be a theme of ‘big things’ – this time we take a look at website layouts where big logos and page headers seem to be forming a fairly common trend of the next generation of website designs.

Large page headers which commonly take up the large majority of viewable screen are designed to try and make an impression on the user, they’re often quite abstract in look as the mission in mind is to make you remember a particular company or service that the website is advertising.

The large header technique is based on an older trend of ‘Splash pages’ where designers placed large visuals/images on home pages with no other content and contain links to pages further down in the website navigation – the only difference with large page headers is that the need to navigate down to lower level pages is no longer required – to see more content on a large header design, you simply scroll down.

Examples of all things large include: www.bountybev.com and http://ma.tt/

Slidedeck

---

If your website advertises a product or service that needs a bit of explaining, this next trick could perhaps work for you. Slidedeck is a slider style information component that can be added onto your website homepage to list your product benefits in a non-obtrusive style. Slidedeck allows more information to be provided effectively in a small amount of screen space and can be completely customised to match your website look and feel. Users can browse information on Slidedeck at their own pace to find out more about your product or service offerings.

It allows items such as forms, images, buttons and animation to be added to each slider step.

Slidedeck examples are available to view at www.slidedeck.com.

Web Meets Print

---

One of the biggest trends that the web is starting to see is the growing similarities between print and web design. When you look compare the two mediums, the internet has only been around for a little while to the print industry which has been experimenting and perfecting content layouts for decades.

Recently website designers have been looking closer at print media and applying similar layout principles such as big images, column layouts and careful organisation – which has been resulting in websites that start to resemble magazines. The advantage of print layout on the web means that reading content online will become much easier for users who are more comfortable reading content from newspapers or magazines.

This trend will continue to grow over time – so far entertainment and blog websites have favored this style and is expected to extend to further for online newspaper and magazine websites.

An example of a magazine style design is at: www.bmivoyager.com.