Are You A Business Owner – Here Are 5 Development Trends To Watch Out For

More than 70 days into the new year we have endless to talk about everything from the coolest fashion trends to the advancements in technology. It’s pretty safe to say that the new year brought some major advancements in the world of web development. Not just this, but the plethora of platforms, various languages, and other cogs which make up the web are evolving constantly. Keeping up with these endless developments can be a huge potential time sink.

For instance, we all are just wondering in which direction is WordPress heading, also we are pretty curious about the global trends on the horizon. To put your heads thinking about what’s in store, we’ll need to keep in consideration factors like the daily number of web browsers, most popular protocols and the most appealing designs as per the users. 

Here, we’ll focus on the upcoming trends, which will rule the web development market till the next set of trends overpowers them. From the reign of one-page static websites to the rise in the push notifications, to the decreasing use of flash in the favour of HTML5, and lot more. Let’s start discussing!!

Rising One-Page Website Designs

For the uninitiated among you, there are basically two types of websites: one-page setup and multi-page affairs. Going by the traditional approach, it was all about giving each topic its own page. This is how the majority of the websites were made. However, with the given rate of evolution in the way the visitors read the websites, there is a very strong case which asks to cut down the content to the bare minimum which will lead to more conversion rate. As the days pass the number of people browsing the internet on mobile is increasing in regard to the ones who use desktop computers.

This the reason, web design styles which favour the ease-of scrolling- while making sure that the navigation hyperlinks don’t lead to usability issues- are leading the way.

This sums up that the infinite number of individual pages is a big No, and concise yet scrollable sections are what’s trending-i.e one-page web designs. In the end, as a website owner, you would want to structure the single page website just like a landing page, although the scope for creative ordering is a lot more. While you will always to add a contact form at the bottom footer and a call to action on the top, all the information will be arranged as per the sales funnel.

Progressive Web Applications

Mobile is the clear winner when it comes to highest web usage in competition with the desktop. Users turn to tablets and phones instead of a desktop to search anything. The mobile apps are mature and are designed in a user-friendly way, but it becomes very difficult to make the customers give up their system memory for the mobile application.

Here come the progressive web applications, these are websites which look and work like mobile apps, with a nuanced user-interface and a highly sophisticated set of functionality that the users expect from the mobile apps.

Progressive web apps offer a lot of benefits when it comes to speed, usability, security and offline access. Also, where basic web applications need a middleman in the form of an app store, the progressive web application don’t.

Customer Support Automation

Toll-free support and the help documents have been doing a great work, but we are ready to move to a bigger and better customer support version. With the improved and enhanced natural language understanding and processing, AI and Chatbots embedded systems will put a halt to endless tier-1 problems. Thereby increasing the possibility to personalize the customer profiles and scale the operations at the same given time. The upcoming generation of the AI service agents will fool you; that’s how smoothly conversational we hope them to be.

 End of The Pop-Up Era

Businesses have been using interstitials and pop-ups to make sure that the customers see information and messaging that the companies feel are important. But from a users end, pop-ups have always been a nuisance, it breaks the flow and diverts them from the information which they are looking for.

From the past some time these pop-ups have been on a decline, but 2018 will be the year when these will become history. Much of this new no pop-up is driven by Google itself. In 2016 the search giant announced that sites using this invasive messaging strategy will be punished,  but it took some time for businesses to taste this bitter truth.

 CSS Grid

Bootstrap brought about a revolution after which the W3C decided to come up their own spin-off- kind of. Though CSS has been there for quite some time now, it will surely pick up some pace and take the centre stage this year. Till date, CSS Grid is the most powerful layout system.

Gone are the days when you had to hack your way to the centre things vertically. Or using the floats. Just like the bootstrap, it has rows and columns. Coupled with some media queries it can give us a feature rich responsive development experience.

With the plethora of platforms, coding languages, frameworks and several other features which make up the website, keeping unnotified of the newest developments can be very discouraging. After all, researching every one of these takes a lot of time which you can put to some more projects. On the other hand, understanding the newest trends can help you understand and address the client needs better.