Four Tips to Level-Up Your Website in 2021

Ever wonder what the other guy is doing right? Here are four easy ways to level up your website in 2021.

1. Bold Fonts

While serif fonts have recently made a comeback due to their elegant appeal, capturing the attention of an audience is still best done with a bold, clean sans-serif font. Most major news websites use this technique to ensure their headlines are easily seen, but even casual blogs and leisure websites like buzzfeed do the same. The clean-cut geometry of a sans-serif font facilitates reading on the web, while serif fonts are best used in print publications. Fonts like Montserrat, Gotham, and Helvetica are a great place to start. Although there is room for nuance here, the general rule of thumb is to avoid complex or hard-to-read fonts as often as possible.

2. Flat Icons

In recent years, companies like Instagram, Spotify, and Microsoft have all flattened and simplified their logos, a move that has benefited their brands significantly. Following this trend in logo design, many businesses have also opted to update their website and app icons in a similar fashion. While skeuomorphism has been out of style for many years, flat design has since taken precedence due to the rising demand for clean and functional visual elements. This is because icons are meant to visually describe a function of your website – for instance, most “home” buttons (unless written out as the word “home”) are shaped like a house. In order to provide a high-end user experience, icons need to be located and navigated through seamlessly. Icons that are hyper-realistic or overuse colors and gradients over-complicate their function and look visually unappealing. Simply put, flat icons are easier to customize, easier to remember, and more aesthetically pleasing than their old counterparts. I suspect we will continue to see this style for websites in 2021.

3. Dynamic Scrolling – Parallax Done Right

A great example of this is Google’s Pixel 5 product line. The use of transparent product mockups at different angles allows you to get a good sense of the product as you scroll through the page, while the muted background colors intentionally give the product room to take the spotlight. Rather than implementing a standard photo carousel or lightbox, this technique allows Google to take its users through a story of their product as an extension of their brand. The use of parallax here is subtle, yet it adds dimension and movement to the page in a way that doesn’t overwhelm the user – it’s a perfect example of leveraging simplicity with elegance, and it instantly sets them apart from their competitors.

4. Say Less

Information overload is a very real thing these days, and it’s important to recognize this when it comes to your business. The last thing you want is to overwhelm your audience before you’ve even had a chance to introduce your product. Think about it – how many times have you gone to a webpage on a coffee break looking for some quick information only to be faced with a brick wall of a paragraph? Chances are you either skimmed through it or hit the back button, but probably didn’t stick around to read everything word for word. Your time is valuable, and so is that of your audience. Here are some quick tips on being more mindful with your content for your website in 2021:

1. Try to keep your headers and headlines to ten words or less, and your surface-level descriptions to three lines or less. There will be plenty of time to explain your brand in further detail as the user explores your website. Generally speaking, the most important information you have to offer should be displayed first, as concisely as possible.
2. If you have a lot to say, break up your content into smaller parts. Small text combined with a small line-height and heavy verbiage is a great way to ensure no one will want to read your content. Shorter sentences in larger font size are easier to digest and have a higher chance of staying in your audience’s mind long after they’ve left your website.
3. Remember, you are the expert of your brand, and not everyone who reads your content will be. While you never want to patronize your audience, taking the time to define terms relevant to your industry and other information specific to your brand shows that you have an interest in both sharing knowledge and being understood. It’s the difference between talking to your viewers and talking at them.

We hope these four tips help you bring your website’s best self forward in 2021. Let us know your thoughts in the comments, and please share if you care! 🙂

Written by Vanessa Miranda, graphic designer  at Grova Creative. 

Grova Creative is a woman, minority, and veteran-owned agency headquartered in Tallahassee, Florida, and works with clients all across the United States. If you are a business or organization seeking help with advertising, marketing, branding, messaging, marketing, strategy, website development, or other creative assets, visit grova.com.