Designing Your Website – What Are the Factors to Consider?
Designing your Website – You’re making a website. It will get announced soon, and you want it to be the best it can be. What will the web look like in 2022? You’ve got some ideas, but you don’t know for sure.
In the meantime, you have questions: How do I make my new site functionally compatible with screen readers and screen magnifiers? What about handheld screens and incoming calls? Should I care about keyboard navigation on desktop browsers and mobile ones? Now that touchscreens are standard issues on every new computer, how will I accommodate them without losing my mind?
As more people adopt smartphones to browse the web and read content, this is becoming an ever-increasing problem. The number of mobile users (both smartphones and tablets) has been steadily growing over the past several years, with this growth rate expected to continue exponentially into 2022.
There’s now crazy tech out there, so how do we build a website that works for everyone?
Table of Contents
Making your website accessible for everyone
Designing a website in 2022 means creating how people will be using your site and not how they are using it now. In some ways, this is easier than predicting what people will want six years from now.
We already know that more and more users are accessing the web on mobile devices, particularly smartphones. However, we still make our websites with big screens in mind: large monitors, high-resolution displays, fast connections, and unlimited bandwidth.
Adding web accessibility to your design process can help you create a site that will scale down to any screen size or connection speed. This process involves ensuring that everyone can access your content regardless of the device they use or disability they may have.
Using the Latest Tools
There is no need to worry about website redesigns going out of style anytime soon. Website design is evolving, and it will continue to change rapidly in the future. Software developers refine their platforms continually. It means new tools that take advantage of these developments are getting launched.
Gone are the days we needed to know how to code a website or spend hours fine-tuning our layouts in Photoshop. Several design tools help speed up the redesign process and make things easier.
You can look for something simple that plugs right into your existing content management system or something more advanced. There’s bound to be a tool that meets your needs, and they come at affordable prices!
Big Colorful Buttons Are Out
If you’re reading this, it’s likely that you have a deep understanding of UI design and have been practicing it for many years. But even if you have not studied design, it’s still possible that your current work made you aware of some of these practices. You can even implement them yourself!
In this section, I will be going over the various elements that make up websites in 2022. Although we’ll be going over what they look like and how to implement them, I won’t be going into the details on coding or workflow. My goal with this section is not to instruct readers on accomplishing specific design patterns. However, it is to provide general guidelines so readers can envision how web pages may look in the future and inspire them to create their own original designs.
Simplify, Simplify, Simplify
Designing for the future means opting for simplicity. It is particularly true of the internet, where our clients’ users are increasingly coming from mobile devices on limited data plans with little time to spare. So when you are building a new interface, it’s important to keep some key principles in mind.
Your Website Is Everywhere
With the exponential growth of mobile devices and wearable technology, how will your website need to change in 2022?
The sheer number of ways we access websites today is astounding. There are computers that run on desktops, laptops, tablets, and smartphones.
Then there are several wearable technologies that can connect us to the internet. And it’s not just about traditional web browsing; a website can be accessed through virtual reality simulation or augmented reality apps. All these different avenues for accessing a website mean that you have to consider several screen sizes and resolutions when deciding how your design can get handled.
If you were looking at designing a new website in 2018 or before, you probably would have used a design template built. However, with new technology comes new tools in 2022. You can use browser-based prototyping tools that help create high-fidelity mockups without downloading any software. Amazon Web Services offers .NET core services that allow developers to create batch processes within their code.