Doc Pop’s News Drop: Worst Web Design Trends of 2016

Doc’s WordPress News Drop is a weekly report on the most pressing WordPress news. When the news drops, I will pick it up and deliver it right to you.

With 2017 right around the corner, I thought it would be fun to wrap up some of the worst web design trends of 2016.

Love WordPress news, but have a hard time reading because they used a dark grey font on a light grey background? This is Doc Pop’s News Drop.

I don’t know about you, but I think 2017 can’t get here soon enough. So this week, we thought it would be fun to talk about some of the worst web design trends of 2016 and resolve to make the web a better looking place in 2017.

Hiding everything in a hamburger menu
– Minimal is definetly a trend these days, so I can see the idea behind wanting to declutter your site, but it sucks when I land on your store and literally can’t find any text, links, or images to click on. The trend of sticking important features into a little hamburger menu isn’t just bad for me, consider the difficulties it creates for visually impaired or non-web savy web users. “We’ll I want to order some flowers for a friend, so clearly I should be on the look out for a button with 3 small lines on it.” If users can’t quickly find what they are looking for on the front page of your site, they probably aren’t going to stick around to click on random icons.

Missing search bars-
Speaking of navigation, while website styles may change, it’s always true that you can find whatever you are looking for by using a site’s search tool. But what happens if you can’t even find that search tool. Every page should have a search bar that’s easy to find and preferably up top. A common trend these days is to replace that bar with an icon (usually a magnifying glass). Even worse, these search buttons are sometimes tucked in with other social media widgets and can be extra hard to find. Once again, keep in mind visually impaired readers who may visit your site. These readers often rely on these search bars as an easy way to navigate, but if you are using an image with no text this makes the search bar innacesable to their screen reader software and won’t even show up if the user uses command F to scan your page for the word search.

Harder to read fonts-
Somewhere along the way, folks decided that true black text on actual white backgrounds ws overrated. That makes sense, there’s plenty of room to go for a warmer hue background and a softer black font, but I feel like that trend is starting to get out of hand. Especially when combined with a trend towards lighter and thinner fonts. Thanks Medium.

Carousels–
Another trend that seems to be spinning out of control is Carousels, also known as “slide shows”. They don’t really take away functionality, but I don’t think they offer any extra functionality either. It’s just another distracting thing that’s probably not going to show me the thing I’m looking for. Not to mention the stress all those extra images and javascript add to load time. At one point, carousels may have been a good way for your design skills to really stand out, but these days carousels really give most sites a cookie cutter kind of feel.

That’s it for this week’s News Drop. Think we missed a terrible web trend of 2016? Share it in the comments below or tweet at us at @thetorquemag on Twitter.