Maggie Evans 
With so many people willing to just move on from pretty much everything that has happened so far this year, countless web designers are already looking ahead to next year to see what kinds of trends might dominate the scene in the near future. One of the biggest trends that individual web managers are likely to see is the fusion of SEO with design.
Site designers are likely going to try and find every tag they can to try and get a leg up on their competition, which is especially useful for smaller businesses who might otherwise languish in the rankings. While end users probably won't see all of the tags hidden inside of HTML and JavaScript listings, search engines certainly will. This might have a pretty big influence on the sites they end up seeing whenever they perform a search.
Quite a few designers will probably migrate to a rapid development framework as well, which should make it easier for them to pump out these kinds of sites in droves.
New Frameworks Coming in 2021
Website design specialists are looking into drastically new ways of designing sites. Rather than build on top of some kind of traditional site construction tool, they're turning to simple application frameworks that somewhat resemble the way older VB applications were coded. That means they're free to deploy a large number of pages in a short period of time.
Some people might think that this will increase the amount of spam getting uploaded to the clearnet, but the opposite is probably true. Companies that might not have otherwise been able to post professional content are suddenly empowered to do so. Developers might even use this to create large scrolling pages, which are all subdivided into individual sections.
That kind of design certainly isn't going to replace responsive styles, but it'll surely supplement it in many markets. You're likely to see high resolution scrolling web pages targeting industries that continue to make heavy use of desktop operating systems.
That's also going to heavily influence the color pallet used by these developers.
Dedicated Dark Mode
Chances are that you've tried a piece of software lately that has a dark mode, which is perfect for those who are working at night. It can be difficult to look at bright garish backgrounds when you don't have much in the way of ambient light, which has quickly made this an attractive option. Most sites that include this use a control that allows users to switch the background lighting feature on and off. That gives them an extra degree of control over how they see an individual page. Those who provide web applications inside of a browser have flocked to this kind of design more than anyone else. Take, for example, what GitHub's code viewer now looks like:
Considering the emphasis on physical attributes like an integrated night mode, it's easy to imagine that people might also start to migrate away from the tools they originally used to build their sites and adopt something a bit more modern.
The Continued Dominance of WordPress
As the eternal debate regarding Wix vs WordPress continues to rage, both platforms are growing in popularity. That being said, it's highly likely that WordPress will start to carve out a bigger piece of market share in the next few years.
With such a wide array of open-source themes that are now free to download, WordPress has started to attract a decent image for itself in the FOSS community. At the same time, the way that users interact with sites is changing.
You can expect to see more landing pages that integrate with a WordPress shopping cart or customer relationship management widget in the near future. These will probably look quite bare-bones.
Less, however, is more when it comes to web design. Well-designed sites tend to be quite lightweight, since a lightweight design tends to load well on almost any device. Take Amtrak, for example, which re-skinned its route planner to offer a streamlined look for potential passengers.
As a greater number of sites compete for a stable number of consumers, we're likely to see countless other organizations do the same.
