The Sleekest Web Design Trends of 2019 - K2 Santa Rosa Web Design

A new year means fresh web design trends to drool over. Here at K2 Santa Rosa Web Design, we’re excited to experiment with new trends this year. We are always aiming to improve our web design and SEO skills so we can offer you the best possible services available for Santa Rosa web design.

Check out these web design trends you’re bound to see everywhere in 2019.

Micro-Interactions

The purpose of micro-interactions is to delight the user and connect with them in a human way. You may have experienced this with any small actions you take on a website: refreshing the page, hovering over an image, or even seeing the notification number on your social media. These all count as micro-interactions.

Glitch Graphics
We have an interesting relationship with technology right now. We don’t know what we would do without it, but we also don’t want it to take over. This relationship is most symbolically represented in glitch graphics -- or design that illustrates static, flashes of light, and other inconsistencies that tell us when something is wrong with our tech.

Black-and-White Palettes

Color plays a huge role in the way we see the world, both biologically and emotionally. For a website, color helps to determine the look and feel of a brand, so when we remove color, we are forced to look at the images and shapes in a new way.

Black-and-white web design palettes ask the viewer to slow down and soak in the visuals. White represents clean and orderly while black represents assertiveness and strength. Together they create a balance that is timelessly beautiful.

This doesn’t mean web designers can’t use color. Choose one accent brand color that pairs well with black and white to provide more dimension and sophistication.

Natural and Organic Design Inspiration

Web design has come a long way since its sharp, grid-like beginnings. As the digital sphere continues to become a natural “place” for people to hang out, there are more natural, soft, and rounded design elements trending. Web designers are choosing shapes that demonstrate comfort, leisure, and approach ability.

Interestingly enough, web designers are taking inspiration from nature: asymmetrical lines and soft palettes that remind us of plants, trees, clouds, and petals.

More Video

Google has recently made some changes to their search engine results algorithms (surprise, surprise). This time, they have mixed the search results to include more video. This is an inadvertent recommendation for businesses to produce more video content so they are more easily found on Google. That’s right, video content is now necessary for your SEO strategy and rankings.

In addition to the SEO benefits, video content also adds diversity and energy to your web pages.

Serifs Have Made It To The Screen - It has always been the “rule” that serifs were used in print, while sans-serifs were used on screen. Of course, great designers break the rules after following them for too long, meaning the serif rule is no longer gold-standard.

While sans-serif fonts will continue to dominate for long form body copy, serif fonts are taking over in headlines, call outs and calls to action. This is because serif fonts are decorative by design, so they stand out more than sans-serif fonts.

Mobile-Friendly Navigation

More and more people perform all their web browsing on a mobile device, so it is crucial that businesses call on web designers to make sure their website is mobile-friendly. This includes that ability for people to navigate through the mobile version of your site easily with their thumb. Pay attention to navigation bars, video content, and pages with lots of text.

Update Your Website With K2 Santa Rosa Web Design

Your website is your digital home, so why not make it beautiful this year? Contact K2 Santa Rosa Website Design to improve the look and feel of your website. We can also update the back end with fresh SEO as well.

 

5 Reasons to Use Wordpress for your Website Design

WordPress is a content management system (CMS) and blogging platform used by 24% of website owners across the globe. But why is WordPress so popular? There are many other CMSs out there, including Shopify, Wix, Weebly, Squarespace, Jumla, and Drupal. With our experience as Santa Rosa WordPress Website Designers, we’ve had clients start with one platform only to get frustrated and switch over to WordPress. When you boil it down, WordPress is the most human-friendly platform. And not just business owner humans, web designers too! If you ask any credible web designer about WordPress, they will probably sing these 5 praises. 

It’s extremely easy to use. From software updates and SEO to the design and content editing, WordPress is is incredibly easy to understand, even when you have a bunch of people with various WordPress competency levels working on the site simultaneously. It’s also very manageable for the one-man-show running everything on his own, if he has the right plugins. WordPress Web design is the easiest way to bring your dream website to life.

WordPress is the bridge between search engines and humans. WordPress is hands down the best platform for websites that need SEO (that’s all websites). The backend is user-friendly and comes equipped with measurement tools to let you know how your SEO will rank and what you can do better.

It’s the universal platform. We always recommend choosing WordPress on the backend because so many people know how to use it, even if it’s just elementary knowledge. This makes things easier when you hire different freelancers tinkering in the backend throughout the life of your website. WordPress can handle it and communication between you and your web development or creative team is likely to be easier. You won’t have to teach a designer or copywriter how to use WordPress.

You have more creative flexibility. Whether you want an opt-in to pop up as your viewers hover over the exit button or a beautiful slideshow of your best work, there’s a plugin for that. You have the ability to optimize your pages, add call to actions that link to your email marketing platform, embed forms, and even make your website load faster.

WordPress is massively supportive and secure. Over the 10 years since its launch, WordPress has gained an incredible amount of support from users, developers, and designers. This community is responsible for making all these plugins and maintaining the usability  on the platform. WordPress also stays current on updates and always informs you when another update is due. Many people who use WordPress as their CRM use WP Engine to host their site. This is a very secure hosting service and offers outstanding integration options.

Interested in designing your site with WordPress? Call our Santa Rosa WordPress Website Design team to set up an introductory call and receive a free quote.

How To Search For A Great Web Designer - Santa Rosa Web Design

Searching For Santa Rosa Web Design

Are you struggling to find a web design company here in Santa Rosa? Guess what, you’re far from alone. This is actually becoming a big issue for business owners, specifically those who do not want to hire a full-time web designer to their staff. No matter where you’re located, hiring a great web designer can be a really difficult process. There seems to be thousands of people claiming to be designers or freelancers, and if you’re relying on job recruiter sites, you could be wasting a lot of time sifting through subpar candidates. Whether you’re on the lookout for a web designer to join your team or a freelance Santa Rosa web designer to tackle a few quick projects, use these hacks to find a web designer that can create the design you’re dreaming of … assuming you dream about design like we do.  

Searching For Web Designers Online

We’ve all been there: sitting in front of the computer screen, staring back and forth between your looming list of design needs and the blank Google Search page, having no idea what to even search first. If “award-winning affordable web designers”, “web designers who can also do SEO” and “unique web design specialists” are listed in your search history, you might be casting too big of a net. If you want to find quality, dependable and creative designers in your area, first start with your region (i.e. Santa Rosa Website Design, San Francisco Web Design and SEO … you get the idea). It may seem a little heavy handed, but if we’re going to stay with this fishing analogy, you’re way more likely find a fat, friendly creative fish that might even tell a few jokes before you eat him. In other words, if you search location-specific terms you are more likely to find design agencies and freelancers who live in your area and are much easier to communicate with.

Searching For Web Designers By Word Of Mouth 

Another tried-and-true way to find Santa Rosa web designers is to ask around. As we’ve mentioned before, everyone and their mother is some form of freelancer now, so we are willing to bet that each one of your friends has a referral for you. If face-to-face meetups are more your style, this will be a much quicker way to find a Santa Rosa Website Designers that can churn out the work you’re looking for.

Once you find a list of designers in your area, start stalking. There are a few key details you will want to note as you research designers:

Check out their portfolios - Do they seem to have a bunch of clients within the same industry? If so, is that industry the same or similar to yours? Checking out their work with past clients will give you an idea of their creative style and see how diverse their designs are.

Read their blog - A great web designer will usually have a lot to say about it.  While the writing doesn’t have to be spectacular, the enthusiasm should definitely be there. Browse their blog to see what they tend to write about and how they talk about it. This will also give you an insight into their communication style, should you choose to hire them.

Reviews and Testimonials - Think of reviews as a pre-interview test. Read through testimonials and reviews and look for patterns and frequent keywords. If several past clients say something about pace, processo or time, then make a note to ask about time frames in the interview. If you see past clients talking about how hard the designer is to get ahold of, make a note of that too.

Check out their LinkedIn - When looking for Santa Rosa web design, it’s very possible that the web designer shares a few connections with you on LinkedIn. If this is the case ask around to see if the web designer has a good reputation.

Don’t forget to read the About - How a web designer talks about herself can tell you a lot about what the person values as well as their background and confidence level in their work. Depending on your budget and web design needs, you might find the web designer is either too experienced or too novice for your needs.

Looks like you found us online, that’s awesome! If you’re in need of some rad, custom web design holler at us through our contact page and we can set up a time to chat!