Discover How These Two Web Design Trends Can Boost Your Engagement

If you’ve ever wanted to say something like, “As far as I’m concerned all web designers can go to you know where!” it looks like your request has been granted.

Okay, I’m not talking about what immediately popped into your mind when I wrote that opening with the reference to the “h-word.” I was actually referring to two hot (there’s another word that begins with “h”) web page design trends that start with that letter:

• The Hello Bar, and
• The Hero Image.

Web designers have been leaning heavily on these two trends recently and if you don’t know what they are by their labels, you have certainly seen them both…a lot.

Turbocharge Your CTA

The Hello Bar is that thin red (usually) band that appears at the very top of a homepage that advertises something, such as a sale on an item or a pitch to sign up for a newsletter. The Hero Image is a very oversized graphic that takes up most of your screen when you load a website’s home page.

While one of these is very tiny and the other quite large, they are both popular right now for the same reason: they have impact. Even though the Hello Bar is small, it grabs your eyes and almost seems to cast a spell on you and make you go click on it. The Hero Image just smacks you in the face and says, “Look at me!” It’s usually a great image that gives us an immediate feel for what the site is trying to accomplish.

Hello Bar is a third-party service that offers a free plan (displays ads) or premium plans (no ads). There are also various plugins available for WordPress sites that accomplish the same thing. If you aren’t getting the results you want with your website call to action, do some additional research on your Hello Bar options and start testing.

This footwear site really illustrates what the Hero Image design is all about. If you would like to have one of the new single-page design websites, a Hero Image might work well for you. You’ll note with this footwear site that its design urges you to keep scrolling down. This tactic was developed to overcome people’s reluctance to clicking and being forced to load additional pages.

Send in a Hero

I think that Hero Images are best suited to ecommerce and blog sites. A great image will immediately engage a visitor and if you’re selling a product, you can usually communicate a lot with an oversized image.

If you have a new website in your future, or are considering a redesign, give some thought to how you might use a Hello Bar and/or a Hero Image.