Last year had witnessed some of the major updates in website designing whether be it open composition of loosely suspended elements fleeing off-screen or asymmetrical layouts or dynamic compositions with large amounts of intersectional diagonal lines or geometric typefaces to name a few.
And now, we have a new year ahead of us with lots of promises and a bright future for web designing along with some major web development companies competing for the top spot. Among them is WordPress, a leading platform, which provides an open source CMS (Content Management Service) based platform to its clients which runs on PHP and MySQL and is free to use.
WordPress web design services are constantly updating itself ever since its birth in 2003 to fit its user’s needs and are currently powering 29% of the total sites present on the internet with almost half of the top 100 blogs including The Next Web, TechCrunch, CNN Political Ticker etc. running on its platform.
WordPress 5.0
Since its last release of 4.0 in 2014, WordPress had been working hard on its latest version for the past 3 years i.e. WordPress 5.0 which will be released this year. It is expected to have some over-the-top tricks up its sleeves such as Dotnet onecore support, app publish, push notification as a built-in feature, speech to text framework beta to test inputs from speech and most importantly Unique Content Identifier which is why it is considered to be the biggest major release of the software till now.
Let’s find out what other WordPress trends will dominate 2018 keeping in mind many of them are continuations and slight modifications of last year’s developments.
WordPress themes
WordPress was initially built as a platform for simple blogging, now it handles everything from gigantic news websites to fully equipped e-commerce stores. This year we will see some new heavy-duty themes with page builders to customize hand-made stuff along with one-of-a-kind graphics and unique illustrations.
VR based websites
Virtual Reality is slowly becoming mainstream. WordPress website design as of now fully supports virtual reality devices such as Google Cardboard and Oculus Rift with 360 videos and images. This year we will hopefully see more of these themes with built-in features for VR gadgets.
Website push notifications
Push notifications deliver information from a software application to a computing device without a specific request from the client. With web push notifications getting popular these days, WordPress will have to find clever and interesting ways to integrate the prompt into their design.
Microinteractions
Microinteractions, as the name suggests, are small interactions added to elements of a website to enhance user experience. It is a relatively new term but also one of the hottest upcoming trend of 2018. A fine example would be Medium which introduced the ability to leave ‘claps’ for articles one likes.
Animated elements
Animation has been an ever-growing popular trend since its introduction in web design 2 years back. Using animations to your website can bring life to formerly rigid lifeless pages. In 2018, we can expect some new tweaks in this trend with employment of more complex animation design techniques to enhance user engagement.
Cinematographs
Cinematography is the art of creating the illusion of motion images that are played back at a rapid speed and projected on the screen. The popularity graph of this motion-picture photography is continuously going upward and in 2018 too, we will see a noticeable bend towards this trend.
Mobile design approach
Last year mobile traffic beat out desktop computers and turned out to be the main internet device worldwide. Though mobile web design has been a trend for years, 2018 will see an extra attention to these designs with sticky elements at the bottom, hamburger menus and large typography to name a few.
Video headers
Video content is the new king of online marketing strategy so it is only plausible to use Video headers which are decorative elements like header images but with motion. Though not new, it is still developing into a trend in 2018 as WordPress offers readymade themes that feature video headers such as Inspiro, Balzac or Naira.
Deutone web design
Deutone is a half-tone illustration which is made from a single original image with two different colors at different screen angles. Last year we saw more and more websites adopting this style due to its deutone effect that helps highlight the topography of the site. This year too, much emphasis will be laid on creating themes with this colorful design style.
After Thoughts
2017 was an important year for web designing altogether as it saw the rise of many anticipated trends as well as the fall of many neglected ones. This year is similar as well except for one major difference, the release of WordPress 5.0 and it’s much-awaited Gutenberg Editor which is expected to add many new features and changes to the current admin user interface. So, let’s cross our fingers and hope for the best.