Magento Web Design Trend Spotlight – Montessori Spanish

Every year there are a few web design trends that define the ‘must haves’ when it comes to user interface or the actual design of a website. While there is no sure way to please everybody, usually you will find that these trends solve a problem and offer more than just a pleasurable viewing experience […]

By Joel Holtzman

1.) More Intuitive Navigation Menus

One new trend that is becoming popular, thanks to open source e-commerce software like Magento, is what is known as the ‘full menu’ or ‘exploding menu’. This is when every category of your e-commerce website loads all at once when a visitor puts their mouse over the main product category.

If you visit the website and hover your mouse over the ‘Products’ link you will see exactly what I mean when I say it is a ‘full’ menu. This type of navigation allows visitors to save time and pinpoint exactly what type of product category they are looking for.

2.) Content Slideshows

If you look at the homepage for Montessori Spanish, you will also notice that there is what is called a ‘content slideshow’. This is a slideshow that not only loads images but also html content to accompany the image. What makes this technology useful is you can describe featured products for your visitors so they can learn more about a product before they even take the first step and click on a product page.

This kind of technology can add a lot of credibility to a website while allowing you to pick and choose different products to highlight over time. If you have a product that is not being visited as often as other related products, why not show it off on the homepage and gather more clicks for that product?

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3.) Product Sliders

This is an extension of the content slider. Instead of taking up a lot of space on a page you can have people flip through different products while using a slider navigation. If you look further down on the homepage, you will see a column on the left and the right that allows you to scan through “New Arrivals” as well as the “Listening Library”.

This type of interaction comes in handy if you want to keep your homepage clean and simple without overwhelming your visitor. It also creates an interactive experience that keeps them curious as to what else is available. As they click on the numbers 1-5 they are sure to pay attention to what pair of products will arrive with their selection.

This type of technology allows your customer to really focus on what you are offering them instead of them seeing a page full of products and basic descriptions – something that is easy to skim through or gloss over because people are used to such layouts and are trained to ‘speed through’ large amounts of data as they want to either quickly scan your inventory or make a quick selection and checkout.

4.) Magento Integrated WordPress Blog

One of the main problems of  eCommerce websites is that the content, which mainly is the product description, never changes. Having a WordPress blog integrated into a Magento website will dramatically increase your SEO. Given the structured content of WordPress and the like-ability that search engines tend to show towards WordPress, a blog has become a standard practice in every Magento website we build. In Montessori Spanish we added a WordPress blog under the forum section. This will allow Montessori to publish ever changing and unique fresh content in a blog form and drive additional traffic to the website. In addition,  in the Magento dashboard they can assign a blog post and blog categories to a particular product and the “Related Blog Post” feature will show under the product description as an additional tab, where the visitor can find more information about that product.

There are many more trends that are popular for this year and will become even more popular for the next few years. Check back next week for the next web trends series and see if you can take inspiration from their website just as you can take inspiration from Montessori Spanish.

Magento Development Lead