Web design trends come and go: From carousels to AI chatbots

The client pulls out their phone mid-meeting, navigates to a competitor's website, and holds the screen up like evidence. 'You see? They have one of those.'

For years, that gesture was about carousels. Every homepage had to have one, big, slow, full of stock photos that nobody asked for.

Visitors ignored them completely, scrolled past in half a second, and went looking for the phone number.

Then the trend quietly died, as trends do.