How many of you remember adding “back” arrows in your websites about 10 years ago even though browsers back then had a “back” button? Or when gradients came into play and became super-popular around 2002 didn’t we abuse them for a while? Now they’re either used with style or are an example of a lack of thereof.
Right now we’re in an era of large, often animated headers that mix claims with imagery and/or animation to “show” some key points before the viewer turns to the text. Sometimes people even skip the rest of the site and just go to contact or leave.
Flash is finally positioning itself for games and video and websites start to be more about the content. But can the way that it’s delivered improve? We will see a bunch of tablet devices in the near future, following the apple iPad and that might actually make a difference on how people view sites.
It might actually come back to a more book-style navigation of scrolling or swiping left and right to move forward throughout the site and a contextual menu on the top or bottom to access things quickly. Or a combination of that + a large visual header could actually work out pretty well for both tablet devices and regular computers. We’ll probably have to wait and see, or try and make that new way of delivering content right now and see what happens.
What do you think?