When it comes to web design, popular practice is always changing. Technology improves, designs adapt, and trends emerge. This is part one of a three part blog series about some Web Design trends that you should be paying attention to in 2014. Some of them are far from mandatory, but are pretty cool. Several of them you will want to use yourself because there is no really good reason not to. In no particular order, here they are:

Responsive Design- So actually, this one is the big kahuna of trends. We’ve said it over and over again in our previous blogs, but that’s because it can’t be stated enough that responsive design is a requirement, and if you don’t have it, you will be left in the dust. Responsive design makes your website adapt to look good on any device that can browse the web regardless of screen size. Considering that over 50% of web browsing will take place on a mobile device and not on a computer this year, you don’t want all of those potential customers to think that your site is old and not up with the times. Most websites are going responsive this year if they haven’t already, you don’t want to be one of the few that don’t.

Social Media Badges- There are two ways you can use social media on your website. You can have easy to access links to your own social media pages, or you can have buttons that allow the user to “share” your website on their social media page. Both are very popular, and both are necessary. There is no better marketing tool than to turn your company’s fans into a marketing team for your company by having them tell all of their friends about you. You’re not only reaching an audience you probably wouldn’t normally reach, but you are doing it for free and with the endorsement of somebody that all of those people trust. Social media is one of the things that if you are not already utilizing it, you are already a few years behind the times and it’s time to catch up.

Retina Support- With the invention of screens that are capable of displaying pixels so small that the human eye can’t see them, the content displayed on those screens has to catch up. Apple released the Retina display a few years ago on one of its iPhones, and now it has become quite popular to have screens with that high of a resolution on a whole slew of devices. Graphics that would look decent on your television screen would stand out as a little grainy on a phone or tablet, so improving the resolution of your graphics, or utilizing Scalable Vector Graphics, which won’t become blurry regardless of the size, are some recommended avenues to pursue.

That’s part one of our top picks for web design trends in 2014. We’ve covered some of the basics. Check back next week for part 2, which features some new takes on some old features that are becoming quite trendy today for completely new reasons.