Every year brings a fresh wave of web design trends, and every year most of them age badly. The trick for a small business is to separate the durable shifts from the passing fads, and to only adopt what actually serves your visitors rather than your ego.
Worth following
Big, readable typography, generous whitespace, genuinely fast pages and thoughtful accessibility are less trends than lasting improvements — they make sites easier to use for everyone. Considered motion, used sparingly to guide attention, also earns its place. The long-running coverage at Smashing Magazine is a reliable filter for which techniques have real substance.
Approach with caution
Heavy animation, autoplaying video, trendy-but-illegible fonts and anything that slows the page down tend to cost more in usability than they gain in wow factor. If a flourish doesn't help a visitor do something, it's decoration you'll be paying for in bounce rate.
The timeless test
Before adopting any trend, ask whether it makes the site clearer, faster or easier to use. If yes, embrace it; if it's purely aesthetic, sleep on it. Sites built on fundamentals rather than fashions still look good in five years — and keep converting the whole time.