You probably heard about Ghost CMS, a relatively new blogging platform that generated a lot of buzz on its launch. And you’re for sure familiar with WordPress, our favorite CMS that is used by almost 1/4 of all websites.

These blogging tools allow you to easily set up and run beautiful blogs or websites without advanced knowledge of web development. Moreover, you can use themes and plugins to create sites with awesome design and add some extra features like eCommerce, contact forms, social media sharing, widgets and much more.

So, which one is the best for your website: Ghost or WordPress? Let’s start with a little history.

ABOUT WORDPRESS:

WordPress is an open source blogging tool and CMS launched in 2003 by Matt Mullenweg. It started as a simple publishing software, but turned into the most popular blogging platform on web, powering more than 23.4% of all websites. The latest version of WordPress (4.1) has been downloaded more than 16 Mln times. During the years, it became a powerful and robust system than can handle complex websites. Its system of themes and plugins allows you to create beautiful sites with reach functionality and customize them as you wish. WordPress initiated a whole community around it (and we’re really glad to be a part of it).

YOU SHOULD CONSIDER USING WORDPRESS IF:

• You need a powerful CMS and extra features for your blog or site (eCommerce, multi language support, page builders, user management, sliders, etc.). This can be achieved using different plugins or custom development
• You are changing the design frequently and customizing it for you own needs. There are thousands ofWordPress Premium Themes that you can buy, install and personalize your website in minutes
• You don’t want to spend a lot of time and effort on installation and set up. Most of hosting providers are offering 1-click auto-installation for WordPress
• You’re familiar with some web development and can handle customization works. WordPress provides a vast repository with documentation where you can learn how to use it and how to manipulate it. Also, there are lots of tutorials, articles, videos on web where you can learn about it
• You prefer a stable, flexible blogging platform with constant releases and updates, mobile support, extensive documentation and a vast community

ABOUT GHOST:

Ghost is an open source blogging platform that has a clear purpose: to make the process of writing and publishing simple and enjoyable. It was launched in 2013 by John O’Nolan – the former leader of WordPress UX team.  The project was successfully funded on Kickstarter and gathered £196,362. John wanted to provide a simple and beautiful CMS for users that are interested in one thing: blogging. The concept was born out of many frustrations that he met using complex systems like WordPress. Ghost is in its early days, but the team behind it is working hard and they already achieved some good results.

YOU SHOULD CONSIDER USING GHOST IF:

• You don’t need a complex website and you simply want to focus on content creation and publishing. Ghost provides a simple and beautiful dashboard with an intuitive editor (include your content and instantly preview it).
• You need a light and fast blogging system. Ghost is built with JavaScript and uses Node.js framework. This offers better load times and more flexibility for databases
• You run a blog or online publication and don’t need complex features and customizations. Simply install it, and they will take care about everything else (hosting, updates, backups, etc.)
• You like alternatives and open source projects. Ghost is registered as a non-profit organization, this means that the money will be used to make it better (not making shareholders rich)

CONCLUSION

Whatever platform you will choose, make sure you first understand your needs. Once you get used with one of them, you will for sure like it, as both WordPress and Ghost are great tools. Please tell us: which is your favorite one and why?

We explored the latest trends and techniques in web design and listed the most interesting ones. There are some web design trends that are coming from the previous year, but will probably be adopted on a larger scale in 2015. Here are the best of them:

1. MATERIAL DESIGN

Google is setting a new design trend by introducing its material design into the latest version of Android, web applications and Chrome OS. Material design comprises specific components, patterns, style, interaction design across different types of devices.  It reproduces real tactile materials like paper and ink, using animation and lightning.

With material design you can achieve beautiful layouts, transitions, scrolling effects and awesome interaction designs. User’s action provides meaning, transforming the whole design. Here are some nice examples of material design elements.

Google even launched Polymer library, to help designers and developers easily create material design components, applications for desktop or mobile, etc.

2. RESPONSIVE DESIGN, AGAIN

There is no doubt that responsive web design is a must these days. Why? Because more and more users are accessing websites using their mobile devices, and your design should look nice on all of them. Recentstatistics show that in 2014 mobile Internet usage increased by 67%. Thus, 28.5% of users were accessing the web using their smartphones and 6.8% using their tablets. This means that mobile devices account for 35.3% of Internet usage. In 2015, “mobile first” design will be for sure an important factor to consider.

3. SVG, A STEP FORWARD

SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) is probably the best format for responsive web design. It fits ideally flat and material design and it could become the default image format in the future. The advantage of SVG is that it’s a vector format and it’s keeping its sharpness after scaling. Also, you can manipulate it with CSS or JavaScript and create awesome animations.

SVG allows web designers to think less about different screen resolutions and focus solely on their design.

4. STYLE GUIDES

Style guide is an efficient way to consolidate and standardize your markup and CSS, and document the visual components of your website (header, colors, forms, typography, etc.). It’s a comprehensive guide/repository of design and code that can be used as a reference for the whole team (project manager, developers, designers, etc.).

Style guides have a lot of benefits: you standardize your CSS and can build new components/pages faster, you keep your design consistent, you have an efficient communication on the project, you’re documenting your work.

Here is a complete guide on how to create and manage your style guides.

5. SCROLLING FOR EVERYONE

As the mobile Internet usage emerges, long scrolling pages will be more present. It will probably be completed with interactions, effects and animation to provide a great UX and turn the content into an interactive story.

Studies show that most of the users (from 91% to 100%) will scroll down the page and reach the bottom. Moreover, many users will scroll down even before the page loads completely and over 80% of the views are occurring just above the fold (at approximately 550px). Here is a nice research about scroll behaviorof users across the web.

6. INTERACTION DESIGN

A unique web design is a design that provides meaning and emotion. These can be achieved via interactions, which can be defined as feedback mechanisms providing a great UX. The interactions that are created by designers can separate awesome experiences from poor ones.

Have a look at this interesting interaction design examples by Chris Wright – an interaction designer from Sydney, Australia.

7. CUSTOM TYPOGRAPHY

Web typography is not only the use of fonts on your website. It’s the art of creating and manipulating the typefaces and whitespace as a mean of communication and readability. As Oliver Reichenstein said “Web design is 95% typography”. Beside existing components and resources like Google fonts, Ghost buttons, lettering, big headlines, icon fonts, text animation, etc. we will probably notice a mix of new vs. old techniques that will offer users and designers more flexibility.

You can find everything you should know about practical typography in this ebook or browse some examples of websites with good typography, listed by Awwwards.

8. WEARABLES, GET READY FOR THEM

The revolution of iPhone 6 and Apple Watch will for sure change the way we design. As we previouslyinvestigated this topic, we can assume that the quick adoption of wearable devices will accelerate this process. Web designers will have to move their focus from traditional design for web pages to more flexible design for mobile apps and wearables. We’ll keep an eye on those smartwatches!

9. PERFORMANCE

Site speed is a ranking factor in Google search algorithm. Google encourages web masters to make their web pages load fast on all devices. While this is not mainly a front-end trend, there are lots of optimizations that can be done in CSS and JavaScript to achieve a better performance.

Google is the pioneer in this area. You can investigate your website’s load time online or inspect lots of parameters in Google Chrome console (timeline, rendering, audits, etc.).

10. DECLINE OF ADOBE AND FRAMEWORKS

This is what you’ll not see in 2015. Web designers will still opt for Photoshop to create their works and be a part of its huge community. The Adobe’s releases, presence and authority will keep professionals under its influence. As of popular frameworks like Bootstrap and Foundation, we’ll not notice a considerable decline. We could expect some custom tools and small frameworks for specific cases.

CONCLUSION

2015 will be another year full of excitement and new trends in web design industry. We’re doing our best to implement the latest web design techniques and to offer professional products. We’ve done a lot in this direction and more implementations are yet to come: TeslaThemes site redesign, new WordPress theme based on material design, internal style guides, page speed optimizations and much more.

Keep an eye on the latest web design trends; leave a comment if you have more trends to share!