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Along with the new year, comes new trends and innovations. We as humans living in this society can only embrace the changes and innovations, no matter what. There are updates and changes in almost every field with the coming new year. To stay ahead in business and to be able to offer something different from others we have to follow the trends in any way we can.

The acceptance of changes and updates also goes for website development. Just creating a good website in the beginning stages of your business is not enough. You actually got to keep up with the new trends that come in abundance every year. As a business, it is not possible to follow each and every trend that’s running in the market, but an effort to keep up with it is what matters. You may not be successful in following all the trends, but it will give you an idea of what’s going on and whether you are able to cope up with it or not.

It is extremely important for web developers to keep up with the latest trends and consumer expectations. Now that we are in 2018 we thought of giving you an opinion on what the audience will expect to see from website design in 2018. Things that were popular just a few years ago are now outdated. With 2018 just starting, we are sharing some amazing web development trends expected to grow this year and will create dominance over the internet.

Mobile-Friendly Designs

Mobile technology has started to revolutionize in a way we never even imagined and it is definitely taking over desktop technology. This is one major trend every web developer should be able to cope with. The responsive mobile design gives maximum accessibility to mobile device users and at the same time, it delivers a seamless digital experience. The importance of mobile-friendly website design has increased year on year for a number of years now. This trend doesn’t seem to be changing anytime soon. This year is 2018, and if you are still not mobile ready or even remotely responsive, it’s not going to work.

Fonts

With the changes in the way websites are made and designed, fonts are a major point to consider. They not only give out information, but their job is to entice and interest the visitor on the website to read the actual thing written on the website. Google fonts are free and open-source, and allow you to bring unique typography in more than 135 languages. Integrating these fonts into your websites will go beyond bringing out your brand’s personality. It will also improve your site’s load time and performance. A bolder font will help your visitors to focus on your content, while the whitespace will make it easier to read and skim through. People only spend a few seconds, or a minute or two if you are lucky, looking at your website. You really need to offer something that stands out and catches their attention with that kind of color and design.

Accelerated Mobile Pages

Your website must have Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), no matter what your business or service is. Accelerated Mobile Pages are rendered first for mobile experiences. This way they assist you in getting more traffic to your website. AMP is an open-source coding standard. It allows you to load a website more quickly on mobile. An AMP website ramps up the mobile experience for a visitor coming to your webpage. It does this by simply stripping down the code. AMP is a good option, be it for a new website or an existing one. No visitor likes to wait for a web page to fully load, no matter what website. You sure don’t want your potential customers to feel that inconvenience and go instead to one of your competitors.

Active Sidebars

Live chat and chatbots have been on the market for quite a while now but not many websites have utilized them to their true extent. The right-bottom corner of a website is becoming the perfect location to place a chat interface. There are many tools that are actually incorporating ongoing communication records when a sidebar pops up. Chat Sidebars are important because it allows the visitor to get quick answers to any of their queries. Any person would love to have one of these active chat sidebars to assist them in their search for the answers. This way it makes it easy for visitors to see who they spoke to last, thanks to the history of the conversation.

Interactive Experiences

Consumers these days have a lot of knowledge and exposure to what’s going on, thanks to the internet. They have become very well informed and know what they exactly want from you. They have become demanding and smart, and they have really high expectations. To meet these high expectations, you gotta go under the pressure and offer the exact thing they need. The experience someone has with your brand should be interactive. You should always provide ways for consumers to engage and connect in a meaningful way. A demanding and impatient consumer leads the design to trend toward an experience that sets you apart, so the more the better.

Minimalist Design

Lately, the concept of ‘minimalism’ or ‘less is more’ has taken over the internet. But not every website knows how to make the perfect use of this. Less is more doesn’t mean you don’t offer anything at all to your customers. It means you give out something very meaningful in a short manner. The clean design has recently reached new depths, with many sites reaching for minimalism. Apple is a great example when it comes to minimalism, because of the use of ample white space, pops of colors and simple fonts. The minimalist design could be one of those trends that make an impact and stay in the markets for a very long period. This is expected because Minimalism has been accepted by a large number of people in the market, both the developers and the users included. Website developers need to balance or find a middle ground between beautiful design and useful content to offer that perfect result.

Landing Pages

By landing pages, we mean the SEO landing pages that were created as a huge block of text. These were meant to meet up the search algorithm needs. Earlier these landing pages were simple and dull. People didn’t use a lot of colors or didn’t really use it to the right extent. But now we can see SEO landing pages with advanced design elements. It’s a time where Google is favoring the user experience more than anything. In times like these, there is no way any text-heavy pages are going to rank high. People these days read less. They are more interested in the design and the art through which a message is conveyed.

Buy Buttons

The one-click buy button, which was a patent of Amazon along the back, has experienced a few hiccups in the past and is no more than famous. Amazon has taken great advantage of the one-click buy button. With this, people will be able to execute more flawless shopping experiences. In the past, the buy button has proved to be a major point in capturing the sales, and now both the buy button and order flow can hold key roles in capturing maximum sales.

Expect The Unexpected

Staying up to date with all the web development trends is essential for all the businesses. The Internet has become an undeniably powerful force these days. It is something you just can’t ignore. People are using it for everything, right from communication to handling their businesses and lives. Now that all the work is done over the web, people need the web to be the flawless and perfect thing because it clearly rules their lives. Also, people have become really well informed, thanks to the internet. They know exactly what they want and they demand it.

With such demands and high expectations, the web developers have to stay up to date with all the information and have to stay on their toes to give that perfect result to their audience. This can only be done if they follow what’s going on in the market. They at least need to get all the latest news and trends. What worked last year, is not going to work this year. Every year has got something new in-store.

Conclusion

So with the beginning of 2018, the web developers should take a careful look at what could be the biggest and the most happening trends of this year. Just taking a look is not enough though. Web developers need to plan properly as to which trends should be adopted and how. They need to leverage the importance of each trend. Just blindly following a trend will not work at all. All the point are to be considered and only then the trends should be adopted. Let me know as a web developer which things going to be a web development trend of the year. Share your ideas in a comment.

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