Joomla sees its share of user interface trends, as the latest web fad passes from CMS to CMS. One of the latest UI trends is flat design. Instead of 3D elements galore, with gloss dripping off of Web 2.0 everything, you have simple, nearly minimalist designs moving to the forefront. One of the most prominent displays of flat design came from iOS 7, which revamped its interface to embrace this simple style.
Content Focus
Flat design's main benefit is its ability to frame your website content. When you want your message to speak for itself, pulling away the flashy, jarring elements of your UI helps it stand on its own. Your readers' eyes are not distracted by design elements, but pulled naturally toward the content. It also helps the reader from getting overloaded by all of the information available on the screen at once. Take the time to go through the design framework and identify how each piece of content displays to the reader. You want to keep them looking through your site instead of throwing every bit of information at them at once.
No web designer is perfect, and failure is often an essential part of the creative process. You can have the biggest budget in the world for a site, but sometimes things go horribly wrong. Instead of stressing yourself out over a web design that simply doesn't work, do a postmortem and determine how the design went wrong, and what you can do in the future to avoid similar problems.
Identifying the Issues
Look over your design and make a complete list of what went wrong. If you created the site for a client, include the client feedback as part of the constructive criticism process. Don't leave any problem unturned, even minor ones. None of these issues indicate a failing as a web designer, simply that these elements didn't work together cohesively in this design. Identifying issues within your web design is an important skill, as it allows you to develop awareness of problems within your design before it results in a complete trashing of what you're working on.
Once you've constructed your well-designed, responsive website, your users need to be able to spread the word about what they find there. Providing social media buttons is the basic method of encouraging people to share your content with their social media networks, and it's important to understand the best practices for posting these buttons. Here is an overview of social media buttons, to help you get started:
Know the difference between following and sharing
Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ and Pinterest all offer plug-ins that allow you to post "follow" and "share" buttons on your site. Third-party plug-ins are also available, to make the posting process super-simple.
The web industry moves so fast that it's no surprise that the web design trends change every year. If you are wondering what this year will bring when it comes to web design and development, it's time to learn some of the top predictions. You'll find that you have already noticed a few of them in use!
No More Stock Photography
Many people see stock photography as cheesy or even spammy, so it's no surprise that no one wants to look at it anymore. If you want people to take your websites seriously, say no to stock photography. Of course, that doesn't mean you should forego images altogether.
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