Do you ever get the feeling that every website looks basically the same these days? This certainly wasn't always the case. So what has changed in the last few years (or not, as the case may be) to create this relative stability in the website world?
Older readers will almost certainly remember a time where websites would completely change from one year to the next as companies followed the latest web design trends. Any website that hadn't had some attention in a couple of years looked hugely dated.
In the last few years however, website design has remained very consistent. Most people wouldn't be able to spot the difference between a site created at the end of the last decade and one created now. Obviously, there's a few innovations here and there, but these are more in the detail and features than in the overall look and feel.
So why aren't things changing much any more?
User Experience Standards
When the internet was in its infancy, designers had a lot of scope to play around, as no-one really knew what worked. However, as things have matured, users have become used to a fairly small set of general designs, and therefore intuitively know how to find what they're looking for within them. It would be a brave designer that pushed against this - is your radical design that good that it's potentially worth confusing users over?
Mobile First Design
The other big thing that's changed in the last 10 years or so is that most browsing is done via mobiles. We have websites for which well over 90% of views are via mobile. That being the case, as you would expect, web design has evolved to be mobile-first, with the desktop / laptop version a distant second consideration. There's very limited space to play with on a phone screen, so the priority has to be getting the content across in a clear and concise manner, and there's really only so many ways to do that in a small space. While you can be much more expansive on a big screen, is it worth spending a lot of time and money on a design that very few people will ever see?
Content Management Systems
Many websites are now put together with the aid of drag-and-drop tools provided by backend systems within Squarespace, Wix, Wordpress and others. These tools necessarily have to be pretty generic to keep things simple for the end users. This leads to websites that all have similar layouts as they've all been created with the same tools by people that aren't designers themselves, so they just have to work with what the system allows for.
Does this all this mean that there's never a good reason for a website rebuild these days? Not necessarily, but the reasons for doing so will probably not be design-related. Any change is more likely to be driven by the content and features. If the platform you're using to create the website hasn't been updated for some time, or doesn't have the ability to evolve as your business grows and your website needs become more complex. then it can often be better to cut your losses and rebuild in another system rather than sticking with what you have and struggling with workaround after workaround.
The next big shift in websites is unlikely to be design-based either - at least not specifically. AI will likely start playing a big part behind the scenes of websites, adapting for site to individual users. Whilst this will largely be content-based, it's certainly not impossible to imagine that it could also alter the design on the fly as well. As ever, it's certainly possible we're completely wrong about this, and 3D buttons and splash pages will be making a comeback in the next few months!