Technology is constantly improving and changing, and trends in website design is just the same. Website design features and elements that were once the innovation, have now been done to death. The one thing you want to avoid is people arriving on your site, only for them to lose interest because your site ignores important web standards or is outdated, because that may mean, lost conversions for you.
So what are the big web design trends for you to think about this year? In a competitive market, that is always evolving, such as the digital one, it’s crucial that you are able to predict these changes, so that you can adapt to them. Below I’ve listed the top 4 major web development trends for you to think about this year, and maybe the years to come.
- Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)
One big web development trend is Accelerated Mobile Pages or simply AMP. The whole idea behind it is pretty much in the name. To enhance the speed in which pages load up, while viewed on a mobile device. AMP technology, at its heart is very similar to PWA. The major difference is that the acceleration of the pages are due to a plugin, developed by Google and Twitter.
AMPS are essentially pages that have been optimised, designed to load and work quickly, and may have a simplified, yet, far more convenient design, which includes only the more basic features, compared to what you would expect from your typically full-scope page. These AMP pages are also always mobile-friendly, and their simplistic design, makes them more readable.
Trends in web design such as AMP development, indicate that the internet is becoming increasingly more user focused. Although 5G is the new technology, with many brands now opting to create native apps, to enhance the overall experience of the user, AMP plugins are there to give companies the ability to cut costs on UX, while reaching visitors in a much more speedily way. The end result is that we should witness much smaller niche products being able to compete in a market amongst the biggest competitors.
- Smart Content Load
A lot of us web designers may be guilty of having a website that is heavy on the resources, packed with third-party integrations and graphic elements, that slow our sites right down. Fortunately, there is such a thing as smart websites that ensure that only the content and images that are seen, are what’s downloaded to the visitors system.
Infinite scrolling and lazy loading are technologies that have been around for several years now. The biggest social networks have been using them for a considerable length of time now, especially infinite scroll. This approach is especially popular when it comes to large web pages.
Web designers need to think about how implementing new technologies to their site can help their site outperform or outrank their competitors in the search engines. These technologies are also designed to improve the experience users will have, when they visit your site, which can also improve ranking and overall conversions.
With the lazy load feature, it will ensure that the major web browsers, such as Firefox, Safari and Google Chrome, will only download images to the user’s site that the user can actually see. This in turn will save on server response and time, and also from downloading content, that may never be seen by the user.
A larger number of visitors, never get to the bottom of a website. So it makes very little sense to force the user to download the content at the bottom. The benefits to not loading such content is ultimately, quicker load times. The best approach is for only the content in your immediate view to be loaded.
- Voice Search Optimization
When we look at the future of web development, we can see that it is slowly edging towards the voice, and it’s a lot more than just home assistant devices, such as Amazon’s Alexa, Siri and Google Home. We can expect that in this year, for more than half of the IoT and smart devices, to be activated and to execute commands made by the voice. These devices will also be able to remember speech patterns, so that they can recognise different people. This means a personalised AI-based experience.
The most significant and noteworthy example of this technology, has to be voice search, which was first created more than 10 years ago. Research has shown that many end users would rather not type commands, when their devices were capable of understanding what they want. It’s for this reason why so many companies are now thinking about and looking at ways of improving and optimising their digital and physical products for voice commands and search. By the next year, we can expect close to 60% of all households globally, to have some kind of voice assistance inside it.
One of the latest trends in web development is voice optimisation and voice-activated self-standing devices for apps and websites alike. This is further strengthened with voice search optimisation and AI for both the owners and end users. The first thing it does is preserve time, allowing more orders to be made, when shopping online. Secondly, it makes multitasking much easier. Thirdly, it increases loyalty, as it helps them better deal with routine. Lastly, voice usage is a very effective and powerful source of behavioural user analytics.
- Chatbots Become More Believable
Chatbots were introduced some years back, but has become increasingly more popular, in the last couple of years, and is only set to increase in popularity, in the years to come. As machine learning and artificial intelligence continue to improve, we can expect chatbots to become commonplace for the average customer seeking support, while shopping online.
As an example, if a customer was to stumble upon your site, looking for some way of contacting you, either by phone or email. If the chatbot knows that your company provides some form of free phone upgrade. Then it can let the customer know all about it. This can result in a positive experience for the consumer, saving the company in costs that would ordinarily be the result of a live person having to speak to the client.
–AUTHOR INFO—
Uchenna Ani-Okoye is a former IT Manager who now runs his own computer support website https://www.compuchenna.co.uk