Do you want to keep your website fresh? The following 8 trends have become passe. According to the Business 2 Community website- these common website features aren’t just annoying to your site visitors, they could be driving them away.

1. Autoplay videos and music

Unless your site is Pandora or Spotify and your user is already logged into their station of choice, automatically playing music when a visitor loads your site isn’t “classy” or “hip” – it’s a nuisance to your user. Having playback or volume controls readily available is helpful, but do your visitors a favor and don’tmake them have to frantically hunt down the “turn off music” buttons when they load your site in the middle of a meeting.

The same goes for videos: autoplaying videos (that includes the GIF-like loops some sites are embedding in their headers) can be hugely distracting for users and make it less likely they’ll enjoy spending time on your site and want to come back again.

2. Mobile-only sites

“Mobile optimization” is more than just a buzzword in web design: thanks to recent updates to Google’s search algorithms, optimizing sites to be highly usable on mobile platforms is a necessity. However, creating an entirely separate site means, well, you’ve created an entirely separate website that you’re now responsible for optimizing, updating, maintaining, debugging, and supporting. Not only that, mobile-only sites can also cause search engine optimization issues with duplicate content and beyond. Instead of creating a separate site entirely, smart web developers and designers would be wise invest a little additional time up front to make their existing site responsive.

3. Overusing parallax

While parallax scrolling used to be a novel website feature, today, it can seem like every other site you visit has some parallax feature to be found.

5. Splash pages

“I love splash pages and flash intros that force me to read tangentially related content before I get to the page I want!”

…Said no one, ever.

While splash pages can be a great way for a website to force you to look at something or collect your email address, they’re pretty terrible for the users (aka your potential visits, leads, and customers) themselves. Don’t even get us started popups or splash pages that exist solely to display a third-party advertisement or to solicit for Facebook likes and Twitter followers.

6. Using Flash

Ok, maybe Flash isn’t entirely going the way of the dinosaurs, but the shift many public and private organizations are making towards using “open” platforms means that platforms like Flash, which aren’t compatible with mobile devices, will likely continue to decrease in popularity.

Not only is Flash content all but ignored by Google, creating Flash content can be time consuming – and have we mentioned it won’t work on mobile? With more than 1.2 billion people accessing the web from mobile devices, creating a website – be it an intro video, page element, or otherwise – they can’t access is worth mentioning again (and again, and again).

7. Image sliders

Image sliders, also known as image carousels, are on their way out as a website design trend – and for good reason.

Sliders, or carousels, tend to get ignored because people assume they are ads, they can go too fast or too slow for people, can sometimes distract from content, and most importantly can actually decrease conversion rates instead of increasing them.

If you’re not tied to the idea of an image slider, there are a few alternatives to consider. For example:

• Show a single static message or offer in text, accompanied by static image(s).
• Show a single static call-to-action alongside some text, possibly accompanied by a static image.
• Show a main message, offer, or CTA where the slider is, then show secondary messages, offers, or CTAs in static featured areas below it.

Still thinking of using a slider? Here’s some more food for thought.

8. Showing off

The concept of “if it’s not broken, don’t fix it” can be applied to many things – from home renovations, to cooking, to web design. Kyle Geiste of HubSpot agrees: “Honestly, the biggest problem is people designing to show off their skills rather than focusing on the basics. If a user understands that X symbol does Y thing in 99% of interfaces, then don’t try to reinvent the wheel. It works. It’s proven to work.”

Special thanks to Kyle Geiste and Amanda Singleton for their insights in this article.

Read more at http://www.business2community.com/digital-marketing/the-8-dying-trends-in-website-design-to-stay-away-from-01283116#YQp4Q3dtQU8fT0jt.99