According to a research reported in the Rake Mark news feed, a visitor only needs 50 milliseconds to make a decision about your website. Even though we are still in February, this web design revelation is shaping web design and some new trends are emerging in 2012.

‘Design Once Display Everywhere’ Web Design

With a raft of new devices hitting the market every year all with different screen sizes and abilities to display a web page, it’s important that the design of your web page can handle all the different mobile devices that might be displayed on it.

This type of ‘Design Once Display Everywhere’ Web Design is being referred to as Responsive web design, creating a fully fluid website, with layouts and images adapted to the size of the screen the page is being viewed on.

Sarah Brassington of Rake Mark, Web Design Staffordshire said, “Mobile users are making a bigger part of everyone’s visitor numbers and the number of mobile users is only going to go up”

Some form of mobile strategy needs to be on place for your business website. You can look for a ‘responsive web design’ strategy or look for a mainstream / mobile site strategy. Which you go for depends on your budget.

Clean / Minimalist Web Design Technique

Simplicity is the key. Effective uses of whitespace, strip things back to what you need and no more.

With the 50 millisecond rule more businesses are moving away from overly complex designs and crowded pages, simpler cleaner designs are being requested more and more. This doesn’t mean cutting back on anything other than items that are unnecessary. Images, animation and other design elements to give the required visual clues and add impact are still there, only anything that doesn’t add to the page is being removed.

Sarah believes that the clean & Minimalist web design is becoming popular due to faster loading times and increased visitor usability.

With the web page weight down pages load faster and users can find the information they are looking for more easily” she said. ,

With less clutter on the page, finding the information you need becomes a simpler task.

Using Infographics to Display Data on the Web

An infographic is a way to visually share information. The graphical display gives more information than if the data were simply provided.

Sarah Brassington said “The infographic made its way onto the web last year and is gaining in popularity. With new design packages available, creating infographics will become as simple as creating Excel Charts.

Many argue that then humble graph or chart is a primitive inforgraphic, other that digital charts and graphs were simply the forerunner. Whatever your point of view these visually stunning images that help us to visualise information like never before are set to become more popular through 2012 and beyond.

Whilst not impacting the design of the website itself, the Infographic is set to revolutionize the way we view and consume information.

Having harnessed a lot of popularity throughout 2011, the Infographic is a bright, enticing and uniquely user-friendly way to communicate information to the end consumer.

In this example of an infographic comparing the Titanic sinking to that of the Concordia, the fact it is written in Portuguese has little effect on the understanding.

 Web Design into 2012 and Beyond

Director and head of design at Rake Mark Web Design in Staffordshire, Sarah Brassington has seen a number of design fads come and go, but these new trends are being driven by required function rather than fashion.

“For example, the adapting designs for mobile devices is born out of a need to satisfy the growing army of mobile browsers, rather than a fad that will fade in time.” She said

Whether these web design trends will become new forces in the world of web design remains to be seen.