As the year ends and we enter 2023, there are lots of changes happening about to happen in 2023 – in both our Birmingham based web design agency and across website design & development in general.

First off, some exciting happenings at ALT Agency as we expand our team to 22 and welcome both Lin – who will be our latest member of our SEO team and Jaun-Claude who will be joining to strengthen up our WordPress development team.

It’s exciting to see the team grow, which has grown considerably since 2020 with Lin and Jaun-Claude being our latest recruits since Melissa and Garth joined us in November 2022 as Senior account management and head of website development respectively.

2023 will see some new web design trends as always!

The first one isn’t a design trend, but ChatGPT is about to become huge! ChatGPT is an AI powered chat bot that acts in a human and interactive way – even going as far as “admitting it’s own mistakes” – Keep an eye on this one, it could change the way we search and interact with the web!

Now to the design trends…

We’re expecting the trend of simplicity to continue through 2023, lots of white space, strong imagery and big bold snappy headlines – which grew rather popular in 2022, we expect this to continue into 2023.

Connecting through a screen in the digital world has always been a tough one for web designers to achieve, but with the use of videos and imagery growing ever bigger, we are seeing a shift towards more making more human connections and emotional connections through websites – Something we expect to see continue to rise in 2023 as brands and businesses invest in their online presence.

Unique cursor design…. A bug bearer for many and a pleasure for the rest. Unique cursor designs have been growing since 2021 and gained a lot more popularity in 2022, we expect these along with really cool and unique custom loading icons to continue to grow into 2023 and beyond.

As content grows, whether that be written or video content we expect the way that content is delivered to be improved and be a really immersive experience.

Expect walls of text with random images breaking them up to be replaced with engaging and animated blog pieces that immerse the reader and take them on a journey throughout the content.

SEO

SEO changes every year, but 2022 saw more than usual volatility in the SEO world including towards the end of the year with the helpful content and spam brain updates which have caused a lot of headaches for those trying to manipulate Google.

Google is only going to be come more powerful and intelligent, whilst it could be threatened by ChatGPT in the future, we don’t necessarily see it in 2023, some SEO experts don’t even see a threat from ChatGPT at all, but with the way the web changes quickly, we have to keep ChatGPT firmly in mind.

Expect SEO to change a lot during 2023 and for SEO services to reflect this.

If we were to take a big bold guess, it would be that links become a little less important than they have been in the past.

GA4 and the sunsetting of traditional Google analytics

The GA4 rollout has begun and as of July 1 2023, traditional analytics will be replaced with GA4 – Now is the time to start migrating your data and getting set up, before the sun sets on the what will be old standard universal analytics platform.

A cookieless world

The use of third-party cookies is due to come to and end, with Google expecting to stop supporting third party cookies with in chrome by the end of 2023.

What this means in simple terms: Cookies hold anonymous data that allow you to target visitors to your website with targeted ads and track/measure their behaviour – This will be severely disrupted and new ways to target visitors and measure success will be shockingly different.