Even a few years ago, features critical to the success of any online business included being responsive. However, responsive websites that shift in size according to screen size are fairly standard in modern websites. For the coming years, far more technical and specialized features will be increasingly required to ensure your website can compete with others and remain profitable. Moreover, some features will likely be required by law.

Finally, what is important for any web designer is to know the difference between fads and actual features. Fads, for instance, include such focus on black-and-white visuals, fonts above the fold, and user interfaces that are dark. You should not pay much attention to fads. Features, however, such as emotional design, improve the way a website works, connecting to your visitor in ways old websites rarely did.

1. Made for the visually impaired

Lawsuits against sites that do not include alt text for images are becoming more common. Alt text for images consists of descriptions. Text-based descriptions for images are important because visually impaired people cannot necessarily see images. However, a text-to-speech interpreter can read the alt text, helping visually impaired people to understand the content of a site.

Without this simple accommodation, a site is unfit for many people to use. Currently, lawsuit trolls enjoy finding such sites as it can mean a hefty payday. However, laws are being considered to require such design features. In terms of profit, you should design your site to include alt text as it will help more customers on your site, leading to more profit.

2. Optimized for speed

Still a standard for site optimization, image compression is probably one component that will always remain important. However, newer optimizations include the following:

• minify
• defer parsing
• inline small CSS

Minification involves reducing the amount of code required to run a page as more code in a page takes longer for a web page to load. In terms of minification, your website should reduce the complexity of JavaScript, CSS, and HTML.

Deferring parsing prevents JavaScript from loading until all the important information of a website has loaded. Inline small CSS simply means including CSS in your HTML rather than putting it in an external CSS file. These types of optimizations help make your site faster and able to compete on smartphones and tablets.

3. Emotional design

Websites are often colorful brochures that promote brands and peddle products. The information is largely displayed in an array of text and graphics designed to convey information rather than emotion. However, various background graphics that utilize simple emoticons, such as frowning faces or smiley faces, can help communicate with a largely under-served market.

Although emoticons do not necessarily help sell products much better than other types of information, they can help website owners gather information on what works and what does not. For instance, a text-based survey will likely be ignored. However, a visual survey that rates a customer’s experience and also uses a continuum of faces indicating severe displeasure to exuberance can engage people and also help them communicate their experience in ways that are more precise than stand-alone text.

4. Registration with CTA

A call to action (CTA) is a prompt for a user to do something or engage in an action, and it is usually presented in the form of a button or form. For the most part, including a CTA in a website has been standard practice. However, summarizing long-form content and linking a CTA to the full version converts more customers and is a design feature many subject-matter experts include in their websites.

For decades, determining and capitalizing on your niche has been a standard of any business. However, subject-matter-expert niches are now redefining how a company conveys expertise to a customer and builds authority. Additionally, in terms of websites, it dictates just how lengthy some content is.

For instance, short content in a website helps people digest the essentials, and it can be displayed in attractive formats that convert traffic. In fact, many websites attempt to limit content on pages to 850 words. However, researchers are finding that so-called long-form content that provides in-depth information over the course of thousands of words engages more readers, gets more shares, and converts more traffic.

Achieving a website with proper CTA design linked to long-form content means finding an experienced design company. To do so, you can simply search “web design Sheffield” or visit the seoleaders.co.uk web site. As the designers at SEOLeaders know, the trick to linking a CTA to long content is to provide an initial summary or headline. This headline will then lead to a page that provides in-depth information as well as a CTA that provides users the ability to download or access the complete content. When people download the complete file, they are prompted to register, which helps sites build a user database. As experts know, this long-form content is then shared again and again.