WordPress Web Design Trends of 2012
The current year was marked by several considerable sweeps in web design and technology. Notwithstanding the increased availability of various web development resources and libraries, designers still have the space for perfection.
Creative web masters’ minds continue working out new trends and technologies of website development; some of them enjoy general recognition. Today we can observe appearance of the enormous quantity of various handheld appliances such as iPhones and iPads. Some of those portable devices even surpass PCs in performance and capacity. With the invasion of those small occupants, it has become absolutely essential to keep two versions of the same website “a full-size and a tight one” for narrow screens of mobile appliances. As it is not always convenient to run several website options simultaneously, we can assert that portable device popularity resulted in total use of responsive websites.
Most of the recent web design trends are based on specific tablet control. As iPad owners browse the web with the help of their finger tips, website designs were modified to make their surfing convenient considering the constraints of small screens.
Later, web developers arrived at the conclusion that optimizations tailored for “portable web surfing” are not bad for regular websites either. Their implementation makes websites lighter, cuts down the loading time and creates excellent user interaction, especially combined with HTML5 and Javascript (both of them are supported by mobile platforms, except Flash that causes indigestion in iOS powered devices), which results in more satisfied customers.
With the advancement of HTML5 there is no need to utilize heavy Flash plugins, however, they stay rather popular among web designers no matter their negative feature to crash from time to time.
Now let’s study some of the most evident trends in WordPress themes design of 2012.
- Responsive WordPress Themes
- Grids in WordPress
- HTML5 & JS
- 3D Effects
- Social Media Integration (Widgets)
- Typography Explosion
- Image Gallery Slideshows
- Multilingual Themes
- Black and White
- Minimalistic WP
- Large Background Photos, Big Headers…Huge Footers
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Responsive or Touch Screen Friendly WordPress Themes
The progress never stops. You can observe the incredible quantity of portable devices of all sizes and screen resolutions filling the market, so web content presentation of websites’ mobile versions can’t satisfy the demands of users any more. Fluid grid based websites are perfectly displayed on any screen, but mobile versions usually neglect the essential part of valuable content. Here the responsive design becomes very useful.
Below are the main screen resolution options supported by responsive websites:
- desktop layout (980px);
- tablet layout (768px);
- smartphone layout – landscape (480px);
- smartphone layout – portrait (320px).
Besides, persuant to Google report, responsive websites are better digested by Google’ crawlers, because there is no need to crawl through multiple pages optimized for various devices. So, it is better to run responsive websites instead of keeping two versions, a full-size and a tight one. This will considerably improve your SEO.
You are welcome to view some beautiful examples of Responsive WordPress templates from TemplateMonster:
CMS & Blog Business WordPress Theme
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CMS & Blog Business WordPress Theme
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CMS & Blog Sport WordPress Theme
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CMS & Blog Business WordPress Theme
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Grids in WordPress
With numerous devices having a wide range of screen options (from mobile phone up to 2560px by 1600px), web designers are compelled to search for additional design tools. Besides the 960gs grid and skeleton, there are many different possibilities to arrange design elements. For instance, the 1140 grid perfectly fitting a 1280px monitor. It becomes fluid on smaller screens and adjusts to the browser width. Under specific conditions it uses media queries to fit the mobile version, piling all the columns on top of each other so that the content stays readable. The application of such flexible grids saves many efforts during responsive themes development.
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HTML5 & JS
We consider HTML5 based websites a future of the Internet. The latest version of HTML without extra plug-ins immediately transforms the dimensions of texts and graphics. HTML5 is an updated version of the code for creating websites. This version makes it possible to integrate all multimedia files into the mainframe. HTML5 together with CSS3 programmers can add visual attractiveness to the websites.
CMS & Blog Business WordPress Theme
If you are not an adherent of HTML5 yet, you can use the following tutorials to fill in the gap:
HTML5 Web Designer’s Book
HTML5 Tutorials
15 Useful HTML5 Tutorials
HTML5 Website Coding Tutorials
JavaScript
The usage of JavaScript is always justified. Cool widgets and effects are created with the help of JavaScript, some of them are even included into the core jQuery library. Nevertheless, the higher-level constructs were separated and packaged into a compact library standing on top of jQuery. This measure was taken in order to keep the core library more focused. You can view some impressive WordPress themes with jQuery implementations.
CMS & Blog Industrial WordPress Theme
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CMS & Blog Web Design WordPress Theme
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CMS & Blog Animals and Pets WordPress Theme
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CMS & Blog Art and Photography WordPress Theme
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3D Effects
Web developers are constantly striving to make user’s experience more interactive. One of the most effective techniques is incorporating 3D effects into design. 3D helps to reach the optical illusion of depth, sometimes websites can compete with movies or games. 3D effects provide better content comprehension from the side of the user.
CMS & Blog Web Design WordPress Theme
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CMS & Blog Business WordPress Theme
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CMS & Blog Business WordPress Theme
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CMS & Blog Business WordPress Theme
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Social Media Integration (Widgets)
Facebook, Twitter and Google+, Digg, StumbleUpon and LinkedIn are the most frequently used social websites. Now-a-days people simply can’t live without sharing various content with friends and relatives. Some people even become addictive from sharing. In our post about the Green WordPress 3.4 we described a new amazing feature, i.e. the tweets can be implemented into the body of a blog post with just a line of code. Everybody can answer this tweet right in the post without going to Twitter. It’s our strong belief that the option will be highly appreciated by the bloggers.
CMS & Blog Exterior WordPress Theme
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CMS & Blog Business WordPress Theme
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Typography Explosion
Fonts are extremely important for delivering the design idea. Such fonts as Arial, Helvetica, Georgia, and Trebuchet MS have a long history. They are still in use, but contemporary designers implement the alternative ones to make the typography style one-of –a-kind. More often decorative and script fonts perform the attention drawing function in WordPress templates, especially when applied in headlines.
CMS & Blog Art and Photography WordPress Theme
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CMS & Blog Hotel WordPress Theme
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Image Gallery Slideshows
Here we can express respect to JavaScript; image sliders executed with JS are really gorgeous and easy to configure. The variety of available scripts is stragering. A few most popular are NivoSlider, liJQuery Image Slider, vSlider, WP Slideshow Gallery, but the list is not complete of course…
CMS & Blog Web Design WordPress Theme
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CMS & Blog Business WordPress Theme
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Multilingual Themes
WordPress community have worked hard creating numerous Plugins which let to build a multilingual blog with ease, as WordPress did not support a bilingual or multilingual blog out-of-the-box before. Now the problem is almost solved the themes have several language options, you just have to extract the text with a specific function from the theme and replace it in the language file. The process takes nearly 10 minutes.
You can view several examples of multilingual WordPress themes developed by Template Monster:
CMS & Blog Business WordPress Theme
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CMS & Blog Cars WordPress Theme
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CMS & Blog Web Design WordPress Theme
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CMS & Blog Web Design WordPress Theme
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Black and White
With plenty of bright color rich websites black & white designs attract us with their different manner. They are uncommon, standing out from the crowd, stylish and elegant. Below you will find interesting designers’ experiments with black and white palette. Some of them surprise by their depth achieved with such limited facilities. Their layouts are not tedious in any case. The templates make the impression of professionalism and refined taste.
CMS & Blog Industrial WordPress Theme
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CMS & Blog Business WordPress Theme
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CMS & Blog Fashion WordPress Theme
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CMS & Blog Computers WordPress Theme
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Minimalistic WP
Minimalistic layout is not overloaded with minor details, colors and decorations and is very easy for perception. The web pages are friendly for our eyes, so the user can stay online longer and find exactly what he needs without feeling tired afterwards. Let your visual receptors relax viewing TemplateMonster’s WordPress templates created in minimalistic style.
CMS & Blog Real Estate WordPress Theme
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CMS & Blog Law WordPress Theme
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CMS & Blog Food and Drink WordPress Theme
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CMS & Blog Business WordPress Theme
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Large Background Photos, Big Headers…Huge Footers
Background
Many WordPress themes have huge photos or images in the background, and it doesn’t depend on website’s orientation. You may see a giant image either on business or on photographer’s website.
CMS & Blog Agriculture WordPress Theme
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CMS & Blog Wedding WordPress Theme
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CMS & Blog Landscape WordPress Theme
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CMS & Blog Fashion WordPress Theme
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Header
There is a strong tendency for oversized headers, and it can be observed not only on WordPress websites. Sometimes a header may occupy more than half of a web page giving the visitor a clear message of the content and sphere of company’s business.
CMS & Blog Exterior Design WordPress Theme
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CMS & Blog Web Design WordPress Theme
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Footer
CMS & Blog Exterior Design WordPress Theme
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CMS & Blog Interior and Furniture WordPress Theme
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In this entry we highlighted only several, most evident trends in WordPress themes design. They might stay popular the next year. All ever appearing design trends are always directed on maximizing user’s convenience. Creative web design is constantly perfecting, so we are quite sure that in the nearest future we will have an urgent desire to share something brand new and efficient with our readers.
