But people LOOOOOOOVE parallax sites… right? Everyone knows clean and simple doesn’t win you a Clio Award. *Satire* A new year is a great time to launch a new website. But with that comes many questions. What are the trends? What type of website can I build that’s so innovative, game-changing, and synergistic that people can’t help but wonder how they survived in life without my Jackson Pollock-inspired mishmash of website greatness? If you really want your website to stand out in 2018, here’s what you have to do. Pop-Ups Everywhere A great way to introduce people to your website is to ask them to sign up for your email list even though they haven’t even figured out whether they like what you’re selling yet. Just throw as many pop-ups as you can on there. In fact, you can throw one on top of another on top of another! Who cares if it’s a bad user experience? Some “growth hacker” you met at the New York Tech Meetup the other night assured you that these babies convert! And, if people don’t want to opt in to receive badly formatted emails from you once every six to eight months, make sure you leave a condescending opt-out option like, “No, I’m a loser that doesn’t want to improve my life” instead of a simple “No thanks.” Animations Galore What could be more fun than lots of animations on your site? Sure, it’ll fuck up the UX on non-standard screen sizes and cause visual distractions that pull your site viewers away from the content they really need to know. But you really, really must have animations on your site so people can tell you apart from all those companies that save animations for dumb and impractical uses like network television cartoons. For added standout effects, add sound effects reminiscent of the most most awkward corporate PowerPoint presentation you’ve ever seen. Or, just add music! I recommend the same song you had on your MySpace page back in 2005. And, if you really want to tell a compelling story, make sure it’s all parallax slide-in effects and requires about 5,000 scroll gestures before anyone can find what they need. 26,000 Nav Bar Items Why have a simple navigation structure when you could have drop downs upon drop-downs upon drop downs? Make sure you add every piece of content your company has ever produced to your drop down options. And make sure the drop downs all rely specifically on hover states that are impossible to navigate on mobile… that’s sure to catch someone’s attention! Hover States On Everything Speaking of hover states, don’t forget to put them on literally everything on your site. Who cares if they make for a shitty tablet experience? Put ’em on every image, every line of text… it doesn’t even matter whether the image is clickable! Hell, just make the page a giant hover state. It may not add much value to your site design, but you’ll inevitably be able to brag about how hard it was for your dev team to code all that insanity, not unlike that time you kept them working through the BlizzCon Livestream to fix your cousin’s chemtrail conspiracy WordPress site that got hacked. Optimize For Desktop You already know that amazing scroll bar you put on the front page is going to look like shit on mobile. But who cares? Optimize for desktop anyway. Who cares if 60% of all ecommerce web traffic on Black Friday came from mobile? Desktop is the way of the FUTURE! Make sure to create a crazy, elaborate site and to completely ignore the mobile experience. It’s not like anyone pays attention to mobile design anyway. Even if your mobile site isn’t even responsive, you’ll still be well on your way to winning design awards because design awards judges only want to see crazy interfaces and DGAF about whether the site is actually functional. Include Lots Of Advertising It doesn’t matter what kind of website you have — it could be a SaaS product, for all I care — just make sure it features clickbait from companies like Outbrain and Taboola that love to use sites like yours to advertise weight loss pills and male pattern baldness cures, and borderline revenge porn. In fact, if any company has ever considered paying you to run their ads on your site, make sure you let ’em all happen instead of trying to find a more viable revenue stream. For added umph, you can make sure to include autoplay web commercials that blast at top volume as users scroll through your site and mine Bitcoin in the web page background. Make Sure The Site Takes A Really, Really Long Time To Load The best things in life are worth waiting for, right? Just like it’s worth it to wait for your brand new animation-fueled, brightly-colored, hover state-endowed website! When designing your site, assume that everyone has the same top-level broadband that you do and that they can all download everything as fast as you can. And if they can’t? Well, think of it this way… that’s 20 more seconds they’ll spend on your site, so you can brag to your marketing manager about what a great job you’re doing keeping people on your site’s home page. If you notice a high bounce rate, you can just assume the user was some kind of idiot who wasn’t really interested in seeing your website anyway. Bury the Content Users Want This will ensure users spend an exorbitant amount of time on your website. Have so many options and accordion menus that they enter an endless rabbit hole of clicking through internal links and expanding nested sections as they try to find things that don’t actually even exist. Visitors might be stuck on your site forever! And who cares if they don’t convert or if they can only figure out how to leave your site after they throw their computers against the wall because they’re so frustrated by your black hole of a website? They should have clicked the right link in the first place! Don’t Make It ADA-Accessible That would take hours! Make sure your website stands out by using the time it would take to make the site ADA accessible and putting it into a funky new interaction design feature that turns your call to action buttons into pictures of Jim Carey in “The Mask” when you click it. That would be “Smokin’!” But really, how many people in the U.S. who use the internet actually have disabilities? Only like 18.7% of Americans. Screw ‘em! Spend No Time On Copy Great copy is a waste of time! Your users can figure out what your product does. Everyone knows what “A data science-backed algorithmic approach to neural network analysis for a winning blockchain platform” means and understands exactly how it applies to their needs. Instead of spending time on copy, spend more time designing layer upon layer of funky interfaces. In fact, if you just take the time to craft a comprehensive illustration of your data-backed algorithmic approach to neural network analysis on the blockchain, then everyone will understand how it works. exactly And there you have it! That’s how you build a website that stands out in 2018. Who needs something clean, sleek, simple, and to the point? Everyone knows clean and simple doesn’t win you a Clio Award! 😀😀 Did you enjoy this piece? Show me the love by clicking the clapping hands below. Your responses to my work encourage me to keep writing!

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