9 Website Design Trends for 2021
The year 2021, the year of the “new normal.” In today’s age of short attention spans your websites must be intuitive, helpful, and immediately grab a visitors attention. As website builders evolve, so does the style trends of construction websites.
Some trends come and go, and others stick around for a while or what we call timeless design. We have some timeless design trends listed below and are sure something will resonate and help you choose the best design style for your construction website.
Below we will cover the top 9 web design trends for 2021 to help your construction website stand out and attract more customers.
9 Contractor Website Design Trends
1) Video Hero Section -
Video background showcasing jobs, employees working, and finished projects are the top trend for contractors in 2021. A video leaves little to question when a potential customer lands on your website about what you do. Embedding a video on your home page is a great design feature if you do it properly and have enough bandwidth from your hosting server. The best way is to use a video hosting service like YouTube or Vimeo and then embed the video from the host.
This is a great way to grab the attention of your website visitors quickly and keep them there. Video also engagingly delivers your message in a way that you can control.
2) Overlapping Layers -
Layering elements of a website is really hot right now, being able to bring the customer into your site like they can reach out and touch it. Your website doesn’t need to be a flat expanse of self-contained boxes anymore. You can overlap elements with photos or other elements. Take a colored background, with a photo overlaying on it, then a text card on the photo with the information is a great example of Overlapping Layers.
3) Bright and Bold Colors -
Using bold colors on your website can help you stand out from other contractors that have opted for neutral colors. Check out the example above with Denton Roofers using bright, bold colors on their website that makes it stand out. Google also is a great example of bright, bold colors utilized to be memorable.
4) Sticky Navagation -
Using a sticky element can add to the user experience (UX) of a website. Making the navigation section of the header sticky at the top makes it easy for your website visitors to navigate around your site. There are creative ways to design a sticky menu, like having a menu button that triggers a hidden navigation menu. Here at Bartholomew Media Group, we utilize this as a UX feature on most websites.
5) Fast Load Time-
Google looks at user experience (UX) in part by how fast your construction website loads. If your page is slow to load, visitors might leave or bounce before it loads, and Google does not like that. The faster your website loads, the more pages the visitors will look at and spend more time getting to know your brand.
6) White Space/Minimalist -
Referring to the space around the elements on a website is called White Space. White space can give a site a spacious, balanced feel. Another benefit of white space is it’s not all cluttered and hard to read; highlighting with a larger font size works great. Using White space gives elements on the page more room to breathe and draw attention to what’s important.
7) Chatbots/Live chat -
A potential customer pops onto your website and is wondering how you can help them. They don’t see what they want right away, bounce, and go find a website that has a Chatbot. In today’s world, your customer wants to get answers fast, like yesterday. That is why Chatbots made the list again.
By providing a chat option you can engage your customers seconds after they land on your website. If they have questions they can get answers from your chat. You can set up chatbots to answer common questions, get the customer’s name, get an email, and company size all automatically and 24/7. What a great way to generate leads and set your business apart by providing great customer service.
8) Gradients -
An easy to implement in design features, and also backgrounds, gradients are very versatile. This may well be the most versatile design features a business can implement. Gradients can be used in graphics, over photos, as a background, or even bring attention to a button. A gradient can give a company an overall design style. This design trend will last for a while, given its versatility.
9) Responsive Websites -
Designing responsive websites is a must for 2021, where customers will view your construction website on all types of devices. A responsive website is a website that delivers the same HTML code, and CSS is used to make it look good on different screen sizes. This saves time on development, updating, maintenance, and load time, a significant user experience factor.
Responsive design is more of a need today than a trend because it’s not going away any time soon.
Conclusion
We just covered what we believe to be the top 9 contractor website design trends for 2021. When you are starting the process of designing a new website you need to have a good idea of what you are trying to accomplish and the best way to get there. Its recommended to pick one design area and use it appropriately across your whole website. Mixing of too many website design concepts can really clutter and bog down a website, so use design elements sparingly.
A great starting point is Pinterest. There are examples of everything covered in this article plus anything you can think of. Its a favorite of ours to get inspiration and design ideas when beginning to plan a website design project.
