Web developers, designers and specialists in the sphere have started making predictions about future web design tendencies long ago. If you are owning a WordPress website, or just thinking of starting your career in any sphere of the web, there is a rule to keep in mind: you always have to be relevant and up to date with web design tendencies. Otherwise you are running the risk of falling behind and losing a large portion of your visitors.

People love novelty and are attracted to everything that is new. As time inches forward, 2016 is on the way of replacing outdated trends by better alternatives. Non-mobile friendly websites and flash intros are definitely going to put brakes on your website’s reputation and increase its bounce rate.

To avoid such problems and to set your website up for success in the upcoming year, I offer 5 ways, that would help you to be in trend and grab a whole lot of attention towards your website.

Go Visual

Text-heavy pages are sometimes hard to scan, boring and time-consuming. This is why your website visitors can be quick to hit the back button. To avoid such a problem here is a simple, yet trendy solution to it. Use visuals.

Images, videos and other visuals grab a lot of attention and make your website visually appealing. Although visuals were used to grab visitors’ attention from the very beginning of WordPress,they are still doing a great job in attracting visitors. The good news is that WordPress Portfolio Gallery theme was recently released to help you to keep up with 2016 trends with ease.

It is a modern and advanced WordPress portfolio theme able to display your website content as a collection of image galleries and portfolios. The most compelling thing about Portfolio Gallery theme is that you can showcase your posts as a slideshow in a lightbox with different transition effects. Your website visitors have the advantage to preview your posts before they get to read them.

The theme comes with six useful and modern layouts, 10 built-in template pages, several multi-functional widgets and other functionalities. Make sure to check out the Portfolio Gallery Pro and go to the theme demo page to see all the features and functionalities of the Portfolio Gallery in use.

Be Simple

I have already mentioned some of the drawbacks that content-heavy pages may entail. In 2016 overfilled websites and pages are more than discouraged. Simplicity and clean design are what we are looking for in the upcoming year. That’s where the trend for hidden menus came from. Hidden menus have gained traction yet in 2015, but they are surely going to prevail in 2016 as well.

They save space, give your website a clean look and make it easy to navigate. If your website theme doesn’t allow you to have a hidden menu, fortunately Responsive Menu plugin comes for help. It enables you to add a tree-lined menu button on your website with the selected menu items. It drops the menu items down when a visitors clicks on it. The plugin is customizable and super easy to use.

Stay Social

Some trends may come and go, but some strategies for attracting an audience online seem to always work. The number of Instagram users is growing rapidly. It has over 400 million monthly active users and more than 75 million people use Instagram every day. It’s becoming increasingly popular, and in order to walk along with the time and trends you need to take this into consideration.

The best way to bring Instagram images together with their hashtags to your WordPress website is to use Instagram Feed WD plugin. This Instagram plugin will enable you to integrate multiple public accounts, images and hashtags to your website and display them in four beautiful views of your choice. The views are sure to give a clean and modern look to your website and provide a better user experience for your visitors.

The advanced lightbox of the plugin will enable you to display Instagram images together with their accompanying metadata and also let your website visitors share the images in other social networks. Your Instagram Feed WD galleries will be automatically updated as new images are added to the feeds in Instagram. There are much more features and functionalities that go into Instagram Feed WD Pro version. To get a complete understanding how it works, go to the Instagram demo.

Try Storytelling

People just love listening to stories. And the growing popularity of storytelling on various websites proves it. This is an interactive way to engage visitors by  providing interesting and detailed information.

When combined with rich animation techniques, storytelling becomes more engaging and keeps holding visitors’ attention over the provided topic. Interesting fact about animations used on websites is that they keep the visitors amused for about 15% more than usual.

I would like to mention Longform, a new and free WordPress theme, fully compatible with the Aesop Story Engine plugin, a great tool for telling longform stories with WordPress. It enables you to  add storytelling components to your website’s  posts or pages. Longform is probably the most affordable way to implement storytelling within your WordPress website.

Provide Responsiveness

With mobile devices dominating the market, responsiveness is the approach mobile users want to experience every time they get on a website.  Responsiveness is a fairly old and well known approach to be included in the upcoming website trends, but it has, and still continues to be one of the most prevailing design requirements in the industry. Responsive design is rather a requirement than necessity.

No matter which of these five strategies you’re going to implement on your website, be sure to test them beforehand, to see what works for you best. Some of these strategies may work for almost all kid of websites, the others may not be relevant for the tone and style of your website.

If you think I missed something worth mentioning, please don’t hesitate to let me know by leaving a comment below.