Website Development

Website Development – New Trends Flowing from the Old Ones

In the very fast-paced world of web development, trends change rapidly, new ones often emerging from long-established practices. New patterns actually still hold something from old trends, either by contrast or as starting point.

Web design strategies go out of fashion either because of technology advances or because of users’ change of preferences. However, strategies that become obsolete do not disappear completely: they are the very starting point for innovations, or the historic reference for present and future analysis.

SEO and user-oriented content

For a long time, web design has focused on keywords. Content used to be produced around keywords, yet with the changes in search engine algorithms this practice has come to an end. Or we can say that content generation now focuses on getting the reader interested in the message so as to build up the brand.

The best type of content is that which allows a connection with the target audience. If the marketer fails to offer easily understood content, prospective visitors will lose interest and search for info somewhere else.

A new pay-per-click approach

While the old PPC strategies focused primarily on keywords, technology now allows for the generation of ads that target very specific subsections of the market. Thanks to the new technologies available, clever web development enables the marketer to find exact consumers for their business.

The unilateral pay-per-click perspective has now developed into an environment that includes online videos, highly-targeted product ads along with contextual advertising.

Visuals partly replace content

Text-heavy websites are more difficult to follow than pages that tell the story by both visuals and text. A large amount of information can be conveyed through pictures and videos and only the essentials can be captured into a block of text or paragraph.

Even for websites that heavily depend on text-content, web development has moved into a more visual direction. Pictures, videos and interactive functions are integrated in the text to make it more appealing to users. This is a more successful way of maintaining web visitors’ interest for a longer period of time.

Simple flat design trend set by Apple

Apple has been a real driver of major technological changes and web development trends. With the release of the iOS7 interface, Apple has welcomed the flat design by ditching the gradients and shadows that created the 3D effect.

Flat UIs have spread even farther with the Windows 8 going for a total flat aesthetic. This kind of design is both simple and clean triggering a more rewarding experience for the user.

Web design changes triggered by SE modifications

Google has been making huge changes in its algorithms over the last two years, and these modifications have led to a full transformation of the World Wide Web.

• Website need to meet special SEO criteria in order to be correctly indexed by search engines;
• Social media and blog activity are relevant for main website ranking;
• Visual content needs to be embedded correctly in HTML pages in order to be well crawled by Google bots etc.

While the very internal mechanisms of the Internet impose the development of certain web design trends, the impact of technological progress remains undeniable on web design and website performance.