Over the years we’ve seen trends come and go, styles come and go, but what style has really taken hold?  What has transcended a mere trend?  Well, we’ll go over three of them in this new Gold Standard of Web Development edition.

#1 FLOATING HEADERS

blankA floating header is an act of pinning a header to the top or side of a site and having it sit in one place while the user scrolls through the website.  It works almost like iframes used to work way back in the day.  This is why I can honestly say that this style has definitely transcended what it is to be a fad.  Just like our website and many of our customers, the floating header isn’t as new as some might think.  The reason this really took root as a gold standard is that it makes it very convenient for PC and Mobile users to quickly navigate no matter what part of the screen they’re reading by keeping the links at the very top of the page.  So it wasn’t just a stylish approach to web design, it had a huge functional factor that really helped to set this as the #1 in the Gold Standard.

#2 PARALAXING

blankI can say this to some customers and they look at me like I spoke a foreign language and I get it, it’s a designer thing.  But many websites now are resorting to this to really catch someone’s eye.  This is the use of an image that changes it’s frame position depending on some kind of interaction or timer on a website to make a box appear to be in 3D while shifting the image in reverse to the flow of the page.   Now, this is just a very frilly type of addon.  No functionality is added at all, but it sure grabs people’s attention and that is what many of our customers want.  The sheer demand from our customers to incorporate eye-catching things that is often achieved with paralaxing is why this makes #2 on the Golds Standard.

#3 SPAM PREVENTION

blankDon’t laugh, but no matter what you do today, a spam bot will find your email address or even a form that goes to your email address and they will take advantage of it and what company or organization wants to spend hours trying to sift through an inbox to pull out one legitimate piece of email?  It costs money and it’s almost always counterproductive in that the products are generally low quality or a scam.  It’s safe to say that no one likes spam which has me pretty curious as to why it’s still being used if that gives any credence to its effectiveness.   So, we’ve found that any software library we’ve made or even Google’s ReCaptcha systems are almost highly popular on websites to both stop spam from being sent through email forms and to stop spam comments on their website entirely.  That is why Spam Prevention makes it to the #3 slot for the Gold Standard.

And that’s all for this month! Check back in November for our top 10 list of the Gold Standard for Web Development!