Web development today – what is important?
Working in the IT industry means that you constantly have to keep up with the ever-changing trends. Failure to follow up on the current fashions in the field of web development will, in the best scenario, mean that you will lose customers to your competition. There are a few primary things that you have to keep in mind when it comes to developing a website, such as the website responsiveness or the speed of the website. If you adhere to these trends, your customer’s website will benefit in many ways, both on the SEO level and the psychological level of an average internet user. So, here are the latest requirements for developing and designing a website that is up to date with all the latest currents.
The website has to be responsive!
Firstly, let’s see what it means for a website to be responsive. Since an average, first-world, internet user is using an increasing number of devices to access and browse the internet, every web developer who strives to make it big in this game has to make sure that the website is readable and accessible from any device that can connect to the internet. The technology has advanced so much that it will soon be possible to access the internet via the microwave (some fridges, for example, already have the option of connecting to the internet so that you can order the food that you need). So, being responsive means that you site can respond to requests from mobile devices (such as smartphones, iPhones, tablets or e-readers) equally well as it would to requests from ordinary computer devices (laptops or desktops).
Why is this important? As I said, average internet users are beginning to increasingly utilize the mobile devices to access the internet. In some situation, a user has no other way of accessing any website. So, let us say that someone wishes to buy a product that your client sells. The user will try to access the website via a mobile device and, if the site is non-responsive, he or she will lose interest in your client and go elsewhere to search for his needs. This is something that has to be prevented. You can now utilize any web developing platform (WordPress, HTML5, CSS3, etc) to build a responsive website. All it takes is to utilize a few tools, and you will be on your way.
Loading must not take long!
Everyone wants to have a website that will be extremely eye-catching, with loads of cool effects and awesome graphics. While it stands that a more beautiful website will be shown around by customers to other people, this does not come for free. The more things there are on a website, the more time it will take to load. This can cause quite a problem for the numbers that are vital for any site. The problem here is mainly of the psychological nature. Namely, we live in a fast-paced world and people have less and less time to wait for anything. In every industry things are getting increasingly sped up. The same goes for the markets. If the customers have to wait a minute or two to get to the information or the product that they need, then the chances are that they will choose another website to come to the desired product. This means that slower loading sites will lead to a loss of visitors, which can only lead further to a loss in sales, thus lowering the profits.
How can this be achieved? Well, there are many ways in which you can speed up the loading times of a website. For example, if you are in charge of finding a hosting solution for the site, then you should look towards the better ones, like VPS or cloud hosting. While they are more expensive, these solutions will provide you with really fast loading times. Also, there are ways in which you can improve the code to make it faster. Things like downsizing images, utilizing browser caching and using other CSS, HTML and JavaScript tools and tricks can greatly help towards the goal of speeding everything up. If you need more info on this, you can read the Moz’s article which explains the ways to speed things up.
Speeding up the website has one more advantage, viewed from the SEO point of view. With one of their algorithm updates, Google has put emphasis on page speed and they have announced that faster loading websites will have higher page rankings and will generally be treated better by this search engine.
Finally, I can say that these are the two most important things when it comes to the latest web developing trends. Website responsiveness and speed are the things that are the most important from the technical aspect of web development. Following these trends will make the website to be more successful, thus achieving the goal of having more traffic and increasing the profits.
