 Llywodraeth. If I may, I'd like to take you back to 2013. It was around about the time when my agency needed to redo its website. It was a great opportunity to say, hey, we've got so much new great work to showcase, but between you and me, for a smaller agency, it's because we didn't have much to do. And, well, the team needed something to do. So we got round a table, probably in a pub, creative lubrication, and we discussed the major and minor points of what we wanted from the site, and everyone wanted it to be different. We wanted to steer clear of what you would typically associate from an agency website, so minimal, clean, simple navigation, probably a white background, so you could just dedicate and focus on the work. Now, we wanted something a little bit different, something else, and this is what we came up with. Now, it's not groundbreaking anyway, but we decided to put our logo front and centre. We decided to brand and design the navigation underneath with what we do, what we've done, what we're doing. We thought it was a more personal approach to navigation, and then behind all this was a full-page video. Scenes of us trying to look cool, doing some work being creative, intertwined with scenes of Brighton. Pretty cheesy, difficult for me to watch back, to be honest, but it did the job. So when all said and done, after far too much time resources in-house bickering, we were really excited. We wanted to get it out to clients, old clients, and hot leads to say, hey, look what we've done, look how great we are. Sat back and waited for the phone to ring. The phone didn't ring. Clients didn't call to say, hey, your site's wonderful, rude. Old clients stayed old clients, and hot leads all went a little bit cold. So we did what any other agency would do, started to look at the data. Had analytics and mouse flow integrated into the site, so we could view the stats, we could see the heat mapping and actually watch people use the site live. The results were amazing. Everyone using our site, well, they're idiots. They seriously couldn't have... No, I'm kidding about the idiot's part. But most people had real issues navigating past the homepage, and if they did, they would click on what we're doing, which was our blog. And our blog wasn't regularly updated and also didn't have our best work, so people would leave the site quite quickly. So people couldn't navigate, and people weren't really navigating past the homepage. Our trade went up. Site time went down. Page views went down, so our Google ranking, which wasn't particularly great in the first place, dropped even further. Our experiment, or not experiment, our want to be different didn't quite work. So we went about to try and change it for something more conventional. And something strange happened. Stats started going through the roof. We were finding we were getting spikes. We noticed the blogger had picked up our websites and promoted it on their site. Another blogger had done the same. One day I remember seeing our sites on a gallery that we'd normally find inspiration. We saw our site there, and that was a big boost. Good for the ego. I had one day an award site come along and say, hey, we want to put you up for an award. This is brilliant. Hell yeah, but it put us in a bit of a predicament. So our audience was well off. It was probably only developers and designers who were looking at the site. And A, they were still finding it tricky to use, even though I'd say they're probably sophisticated website users. And B, they weren't lining our pockets with either projects or money. And so one day until, by luck, by chance, the phone rang. And a client was on the other end. A big client, lots of cool creative projects. And he loved the fact that we were being different. We were trying to be different. And the rest you could say is kind of history. But what made it popular was that the fact that we defy convention, that we didn't really care about website best practices, which I do not condone by the way. Did it resonate within the design community or simply or cynically like I think? A blogger just needed a new fath to promote in its next blog post. To be honest, it doesn't really matter. Because the website, it didn't quite work. I'm not saying it was bad design, but we can be so much better. We tried to innovate, we tried to progress, but we sacrificed the audience and the business. So it got me thinking. How much out there being promoted is the next big thing. This is the best trend. These are the colours to use. These are who to follow. It's actually worthwhile. Because I know as a designer I'm fed with so much. I can't get away from it. Sometimes I see something glossy in you. That's pretty. I want that. How have they done that? I don't know. Let's have a look. Who's done that? What project should we use it for? You get caught up in a rabbit hole that we forget to ask the real questions. I hope so, Daisy. Why? Why does someone come up with this idea? And why is it trending? Now, it's a simple question, really is. But if you can get down to the reasonable conclusion, whether or not it's the exact reason or not, you're in a much better position to decide whether or not it's a flash in the pan fad, or a trend that will have worthwhile resonance for the future of the web. I'm going to take you through a few examples very quickly. Flat design. This was really popular around about 2010-ish. Depending on what part of flat design you're looking at. But this particular style was really popular around about 2010. Even we designed a few sites in this particular style. Why did it come about? Personally, I feel it's like a reaction to skewmorphic design. Skewmorphic design is when an interface is trying to take a real-life counterpart. Now I said that again. Trying to take something from the real life and trying to shove it into digital. I've not done a very good way of explaining that, but Apple were really fond of this particular style. They used to love taking stuff like bookcases and putting it into their apps. Literally trying to create something 3D into a digital environment, going as far as the wood grain and the stitching on the booklets. But it didn't quite work as a community. We thought it looked old-fashioned, but most of all, we were trying to reverse engineer the tangible into digital. Flat design was not necessarily the start, but as a community it helped us think of how we should be designing the web better. Rethinking what's best for digital for screen rather than taking something and reverse engineering it. Even though this particular style of flat design came and went pretty quickly, to me it looks quite outdated and of its time, it was the beginnings of something quite special, the hamburger menu. Not so excited about the hamburger menu, but I'm going to go straight into mobile usage. For me personally, I think the hamburger menu is a brilliant solution to revealing and hiding a navigation with a long list of menu items. What's interesting is seeing the hamburger menu more and more on desktop-sized screens. Why is this coming about? Well, one, probably aesthetic. Contrary to what you may think of, you know, my design you saw in 2013, I love minimal, clean design. Hamburger menu offers that. We're being assumptions and thinking, more people know what the hamburger menu is, so let's just stick it in. And also, it's easy for navigation architecture. Done. Personally, I just don't think it's as functional. I love having to take my mouse from one place all the way to the corner of the screen just to see what the website has to offer. I hate it even more when I have to drag my mouse all the way back where it came from just to click on the link. Great web design is putting me in control of my journey. The hamburger menu takes that away in favour of aesthetic. For everyone in the room, if you do me a favour, though, don't look at the current long story short site because you can see a hamburger menu and then you can see Hippocrite. Sorry. In terms of the future of the hamburger menu, I can see it being split in terms of form and function. Personally, I'd like to see us take the direction that mobile applications are using. Even though mobile apps really promoted the hamburger menu and threw it into public consciousness, we're seeing that they're finding value in moving away from the hamburger menu in favour of different alternatives. If we value the user experience of our customers and clients and audience, I think we should be doing the same. This is quite a new trend. One that I absolutely love, the whole kind of text over images is really, well, I find it really cool, because it's inspiring, kind of awkward. That's because I'm a designer. I'm a print design background, actually, and I feel it takes a lot of nuances and inspiration from that. But within print design, you know exactly what you're going to get. But in responsive, this can go all over the place. Now, because I'm looking at websites all the time, I love this particular style. But as an agency, we've yet to adopt it. We've yet to adopt it because we're a WordPress agency. And we love a product that we can give to our clients so they can take it and use it and edit it themselves. If we gave something like this to them, it's a car crash waiting to happen. So even though I find that this is new, innovative, and a cool trend in my opinion, I feel it has a very specific time and place. And in longevity, I don't see it working within the community. In conclusion, trends can be great. They can be good, they can be bad, they can be ugly. They can be loyal, they can be fickle. They're a great source of conversation, debate. For me, they're a great source of inspiration. Just make sure you ask the right questions. Believe in innovation and progression, but not the sacrifice of your audience or business. This is what we failed to do as an agency when we did our website in 2013. I'm going to say that again. Believe in innovation and progression, but not the sacrifice of the audience or business. Make mistakes. Mistakes are good. Mistakes are showing that you're pushing to the boundaries of your ability. And if you're pushing those boundaries, you're helping progress and push the web forward, making the internet a better place. But don't do it on your own website, idiot. Do you want a passion project? Do you want a sprint? Do you want an experimental piece? And finally, this is for agency owners out there. Please get someone else to your website. You're much easier. Thank you very much. Thank you. Don't go away yet. I love that last sentence. It's so true. Any questions in the audience? Matthew, brilliant talk. What would you say to people who are developers, who are designers, who already work in WordPress, and about wanting to learn more about design? Things like word camps, meetups, giving opportunities to learn more? Absolutely. If I had more time, I would have said that even though I'm talking about design, I think design and designers encompass developers, encompass UX, marketing, the works, I think we're all essentially problem solvers. And I think coming to the likes of WordPress, you get to speak to so many different people from so many different backgrounds who have had different problems that they've solved. And essentially, that's what we are doing at the end of the day. And if we're able as a community to just to tell everyone our experiences, it's only going to make it better. Any more questions? I'll have a quick question then. Any future design trends that you're excited about or anything you want to share that's coming up? I'm really excited about checkout e-commerce. I hate having to go into a new e-commerce and put in however many digits. Yes, that's my address. When everything's stored on, well, it's stored somewhere. And I think we're getting to it with PayPal and Apple Pay, but with the ability to have it on operating platforms and we have thumbprint recognition or face recognition, we can really speed up that process because it's clunky. I would really like to see. I'm really excited about buying stuff online, just streamlining that process to make it really easy. If no other questions, I'll just keep asking. On our website, we're trying to change the dropdown menu on mobile and we've got the hamburger thing. You were saying there's another sort of dropdown menu people use or is that going to be what's used in the future? Is there a better sort of idea coming up? Is this on mobile? Mobile, I guess, or if it's being used on the website as well? In terms of... My nerves may have got ahead of me, but in terms of mobile design, I think the hamburger menu is a great solution. It's a neat and tidy way of hiding a long list of menu items. I feel having a full, visible menu list on a home page on a mobile site just being practical. I would stick with that. Maybe stick a label on it to just really make sure people have got it. It's a lot of swapping of microphones. Anyone else? Any other questions? I'll just go with one last one. When you do websites and clients usually love big header images, I hear all these different designers, different agencies talk about different trends, sliders are out, videos are in, then they're out. When you do on a general level, what would you say is now the trend in hero images, like the big header images on a home page? To be honest, we're probably looking a lot more at video. Website speeds have got quicker and it's so difficult to encompass either a company or a product really quickly in just the slider, even in just the message. We're trying a lot more with video because we're able to add video now to mobile sites. At the moment, we're promoting that quite a bit just because the load times are so much better. Great. Thank you. Video is in. Any questions? Thank you again. Again, thank you for the great design you've done. I really, really love it. A big round of applause.