There is no way of moving away from grabbing the attention of the target audience. With each passing day, the competition on the digital front is becoming tougher and it becomes important to keep the audience interested. Only such kind of audience can lead the websites into making conversions. When it comes to grabbing the attention of the users, web developers are said to play the crucial role in it. They are capable to do or carry out some tactics which can affect the website in positive way.
With the changing times it is important that you keep on improving the web development and here are some trends to watch out for:
Accelerated Mobile Pages – AMP
It was said that 7% of the web traffic received by some of the top publishers in US came from Accelerated Mobile Pages.
But What AMP Actually Stands for?
- AMP is an open source project which was designed keeping the focus on improving the performance of advertisement and web content. The project has been sponsored by Google and has the support of Baidu, Pinterest, Twitter and Bing.
- Search for something on Google and the result will be displayed on the mobile device screen – the big idea.
- This is something that the users would love to have. AMP is capable to Offer benefits like better user experience, improved site speed, more revenue, helps to stay ahead in competition, and improved visibility in search results when implemented properly.
- It is quite challenging to implement AMP. Even though you can find tutorials and resources from Google to work on it, you will need professional web development services to get it done.
Progressive Web Applications –PWA
Progressive Web Apps are different from that of native apps and in 2017; good number of articles were published explaining the same. PWA has turned out to be important for modern-day Web Development in 2018. The concept was formed due to the larger adoption of HTML5 and evolution of internet. PWAs are capable to offer seamless user experience and functionality to the native apps and everything is performed within the mobile browser.
If we talk about the results, it has been said that there has been an increase of conversions by 70% for Flipkart and the time spend by users on the site tripled just by introducing Progressive Web App. The data usage decreased by three times low and rearrangement rate spiked by 40%.
Single Page Applications –SPA
There is no need to reload the page when in use, as SPA work inside the browser. Some of the popular examples of SPA are Gmail, Facebook, Google Maps and GitHub. By making use of JavaScript, the single web pages load other content. The natural behaviour of the browser is showcased with any extra page reloads or waiting time. The pages are directly rendered in the browser as SPAs separately call the markup and data.
Some of the JavaScript frameworks which make it possible are Meteor.js, Angular.js, Aurelia and Ember.js. Compared to other forms, SPA site is much comfortable for the users as all the content on the website is mentioned on a single page straightforward.
Revamped Landing Pages
Landing pages have said to have undergone much changes and transformation over time. By leaving behind all those text-heavy landing pages, developers have now started to have light landing pages which work on to offer the right information that have been made easily accessible to the users. An important thing to take care of when designing landing pages is that to keep the content simple and as little as needed. This is very important as the people who visit your website only read one-third of the content that is written there. So keeping what is needed works best. Ensure to use web design templates and enough amounts of CTAs on your landing page so as to reach faster to the user issues and queries.
Push Notifications
Push notifications are good but can make your users go insane if not used right. When done well, it can work as an effective tool to drive in more traffic and make sales. For better engagement within the mobile apps, push notifications work as one of the most influential solutions. It is important to make sure you offer value with each one and should not go to the extent of overusing them.
When you have to inform the new score, talk about new sales or inform about weather change, push notifications work well. The websites publishing blogs can send push notifications to the readers whenever a new blog is published.
Age of Static Site Generators
By the use of static site generators it is possible to turn dynamic site content into static ones. This is the best and easy to use tool for bloggers of today's. It helps with better site loading speed and keeps the budget low and thus makes the content easily accessible to the users. By the use of static site generators you can easily take care of the security factors. Just by making use of static site generators it is possible to create creative websites from plain texts. Developers who are interested to develop light website can benefit greatly with static site generator.
Use of Hero Images and Videos
If you take a look at the big websites like Nike or Samsung, you will notice that their homepage consists of bold images of people who are quite pleasant and happy featuring the products. With people more inclined towards learning and understanding from images quickly compared to text, why not make use of this positive situation for your business website? This is a kind of the trend which is going to stay in the web Development for a long time. The same can be said for bold and big fonts and geometric patterns. Another way you can make use of this trend is by creating a slideshow on your homepage and stuffing it up with few hero images. You can also put in some efforts to build video with hero images. Compared to images, videos work better and all you need is to come up with a video of few seconds and fill it up with captivating content which can strike a chord within the minds of the users. So as a web developer, this trend is definitely important and something to look forward to when you plan to make alterations in the current website or make a new one for the client.
Interactive UI and Chatbots
Chatbots and live chats are building up a new world of conversational UI. Such kinds of features take care of auto-reply functions and even make things simpler for people. When you inculcate such things into your website, you increase the chances of better customer engagement and offer better user experience. The use of virtual assistants on the website help the users in better shopping by helping them find the products based on their preferences and solving queries that arise. So it can be called as the next big thing when it comes to web development. So just by including simple and interactive chatbot feature, the users are saved from taking the trouble of going through the website and navigating through pages.
The Rise of JavaScript
When it comes to JavaScript, year 2017 is considered as the best in terms of technologies, libraries and frameworks. For web developers, working on JavaScript and reaching to its bottom is on top of the list. Some of the functions offered by JavaScript like RAIL, ES6, Built In method, Callbacks, Node, Pure Functions and Closures have seriously got the web developers to take a pause and notice it. JavaScript also comes with REACT library which can be used to build user interface and for developers they can use it to improve their coding skills. Again, you can work on to build better website interface in the future by combining the resource from the library with frameworks like Meteor.
Going for Minimum Designs
The combined use of vibrant splashes of colors and white space in the website is done to offer a balanced aesthetic experience to the eyes of the visitors. The modern website design is more based on such a development trend. Save the visitors from the tiredness they experience by scrolling the website pages the whole day and stick to minimalist approach when it is about material design. In the new age, less is more and you can see the same when you visit the websites of some of the big names in the market. Just stay away from big and complicated symbols and vectors on your website – just use a dialler icon for contact information, icon or image of books for assignment, etc. Choosing right web development company is important to get it done right.
Mobile First Approach
With more than 89% of media time in a day spend on apps and from that 11% spend on websites, it is always better for the developers to choose mobile-first approach when they are up to designing the web development strategy. This can be considered as the smartest move towards web development as a marketer. You can make sure that the website is best suited for the mobile devices by taking care of different mobile interfaces during the web development. You can also make your website smoother and ensure to offer better user experience on mobile device compared to laptops or desktops introducing a bunch of interactive material design changes in the website.
Motion UI To Be in The Market
The SaaS library comes with motion UI features which can be used to create customized animations and CSS transitions. Motion UI is considered as the next big thing in web development due to the updated version it comes with offering a number of features like animation queuing, transition options and flexible CSS patterns. When you are in the production environment, motion UI lets you explore the website’s navigation features. It even helps to make prototyping easy. With more number of motion UI features available now, it is high time for you to make use of motion UI features in your website to make it more engaging to the users.
Keeping RAIL in Focus for User Experience
The modern age web developers are not at all new to the RAIL strategy. With the help of this strategy it is possible to offer great user experience to the users on the website. Now define UX based on your findings and boost your RAIL strategy in order to build better perspective about the website for the users.
The term RAIL stands for Response, Animation, Idle and Load which is considered as the basic function for websites to define UX. Working on RAIL is important as it acts as an important element for the following:
- For each critical action taken by the user RAIL offers specific goals
- For all the important actions of the users RAIL chunks up UX
- The performance factors of your website can be decided using RAIL.
Real-Time Web Apps
Any information can be transmitted instantly between user and server by using real-time web-app. With the use of websocket the connection between the server and the browser of the user is kept open. Some of the examples of real-time web apps are chat apps like Skype or Facebook Messenger or games with multiplayer facility.
If you are planning to build a chat app, then you should make use of socket.io for development. When developing an app you will have to make use of an engine. If the project is complicated then you will need cloud computing along with real-time transfer of information.
Conclusion
Whether it is about increasing customer engagement using images or video content or offering live chat conversations using Chatbots, web development is now about following the best trends in the market. With web development on a constant move and transformation, new function will get added to the resource or coding language. So brace yourself to get hold of the new trends that will hit the market, till then follow these trends in web development.
