5 Outdated Web Design Trends You Should Do Away With Right Away

When was the last time you gave up on navigating a website that had a cluttered old school design? Well, despite the ever changing design trends in the web world, some websites still fail to let go of the old design elements and adopt newer ones. Always remember, a bad and outdated web design can be a potential reason for the lag in your business. Let’s see some of these old and potentially harmful design trends that might have been popular at some point of time but don’t work anymore.

Separate Mobile Version of a Website

Gone are the days when you had to create a separate mobile version of your website for visitors with mobile devices. Responsive web design makes your main website perfectly usable on smart phones, tablets and desktops without making the users feel like being on a less functional version. Shifting to responsive web design is not going to cost you so much and in many cases, even a responsive theme can do the job for you.

Flash Intros

Flash intros are already on the deathbed, they just turn the customers away from a website. Most of the modern mobile browsers just don’t recognize flash content and even if they do, it does cost your users time and data charges. People nowadays are smart enough to get to what they want on a website without these annoying intros. Although flash intros were once cool and symbol of high end web designing, they don’t work anymore; people just don’t have time for them.

Popup Boxes

If your website has automated popup boxes that show ads, subscription form or anything similar, you are doing it completely wrong. Not only do these things annoy users to the core, they also make them feel like your business is desperate for customers. There is nothing more irritating than a popup ad on the screen while you are trying to focus on the content of a website. To make things worse, these pop-ups are almost impossible to close on mobile web browsers.

Animated GIF Images

Graphical animations are cool and can amuse the user for a moment, but they sure do not add much value to your website. Not only are they useless, they can actually hurt the eyes of your visitors after quite some time. We all have had our share of having fun with these cool animated GIFs for decades and now it’s time to get rid of them. The current design trend is all about simplicity and ease of use, not decorating your website with animations.

Gradients and 3D Effects

There was a time when 3D effects made the visitors wow, but that time is long gone and the latest design trend is on the flat side. With retina displays that call for higher resolution designing, it’s better to adopt the flat UI which is cool and simple. The flat UI has some additional benefits of being easier and less time consuming to create, which makes it the best design style in this ever speeding world. If your website is loaded up with all those complicated 3D elements, it’s time to move over to flat UI.

Whether you are setting up a new website or redesigning an existing one, you need to ensure that your web designer is aware of these old fashioned trends and keeps away from them. A forward looking design firm is sure to give a boost to your website’s performance.