New Year, for a web design and development company, means new opportunity to learn the latest market trends and best practices which can help provide the best quality websites to customers, clients, bloggers, businesses, anybody who wants to leave a strong footprint in the digital era. We, at Wish A Cloud, are always looking at the world with a longing for change and a thirst for innovation. We did great things in the past, we want to one-up that in the future. A pragmatic look at all key developments that took place in the year 2017 fills us with excitement for 2018, which we believe will be the year of promise for us and our customers too.
UX Is Critical
While 24×7 connectivity is great for both businesses and consumers, it poses challenges of its own. In the past two decades, attention spans have decreased drastically. Gone are the days when patience was the best policy. Customers these days want service as fast their fingers can type, and UX has become the lifeblood of websites and mobile apps. A 1-second delay in page load time equals 11% fewer page views, a 16% decrease in customer satisfaction, and 7% loss in conversions, said a study back in 2008. An additional one second of page load-time could cost Amazon $1.6 billion in sales.
Users in 2018 expect smooth, lightning fast websites. With 210.9 million smartphone users accessing the internet on their mobile devices in 2017, mobile optimisation and website responsiveness have become extremely important. Website design companies and web development companies become crucial to an expanding business due to this, as all industry leaders are investing in website remodelling to suit the modern user’s requirements.
Exploring New Markets
57.7% of small and medium-sized business owners intend to invest in a new/improved website, trumping many other major services like social media marketing and digital advertising. The world of websites is changing, fast. A business, any business whether it a brick and mortar grocery store or a completely digital e-commerce entity, needs to keep up with the latest trends in the world market. There are no time-zones in the new world, and ease of doing business has increased globally. High-speed internet has reached common households, bringing large numbers of businesses and service providers closer to consumers all across the world.
China leads the world in terms of internet users with 738.54 million internet users, while 462.12 million Indians are plugged into the internet today. This large pool of internet subscribers forms a strong potential consumer base and also a great market to find service providers. The world has been aware of this for a long time, proved by the fact that a software developer in the US was caught outsourcing his own job to a company in China. That was in 2013, and the internet has only grown in the subsequent years.
New Year, New Technology
2017 taught us that making businesses digital is the most surefire method of reaching out to a wide range of target customers and expand market penetration. This is the real-time era where information is circulated at mind-boggling speeds and where every person is a network node in the superstructure of the Internet. As a website design company in India, we have access to one of the most cutthroat digital markets on the planet. This seems to be a dangerous thing for a growing business, but a good perspective is all it takes to understand how much insight can be gained from a competitive market. The competition keeps us self-aware and on our toes, and we keep reaching out for more knowledge and information on the latest technologies that are going to be the future of the Internet.
The Mobile Experience
Ease of navigation on mobile devices is an obvious priority. Every year, developers and designers are researching new and improved methods to fully utilise the features of mobile devices to improve user navigation and overall experience on the smaller screen. Conversion of mobile visitors is a challenge that has been a losing battle for a very long time. However, the potential for growth for a business that can successfully leverage mobile visitors is limitless. Impulse shopping is not the future, it is the present. And the fact that every marketplace on the planet could be sitting inside your pocket is a lucrative opportunity that only the unwise would ignore.
No surprise that every web design company in the world is working day and night to develop smarter, faster, easier to use mobile apps. We at Wish A Cloud have also invested great energies in the prospect and saw significant progress in the area in 2017. We begin 2018 with high hopes and expectations to continue doing groundbreaking work in mobile optimised web development.
Web Design Resolutions
Understanding the pulse of the market is important, and equally important is planning and executing best practices in web design and website development. The following web design resolutions for 2018 have been made at Wish A Cloud. We have been following most, if not all, of these tips in the past. But reminders don’t hurt.
- Focus on UX. The user must feel engaged with your website. Keep it simple, make it smart, fascinate the user.
- Optimise for Mobile. Your users are spending more and more time on their mobile device. Make your website worth their time, on their phone.
- Improve accessibility using bigger buttons, images, menus. Small, curvy, hard to find elements are out. Give your users big tiles and elements that they cannot miss.
- Provide the big picture, even on a small screen. If your first page doesn’t sum up your website, even on a small device, the user may never get to your second page. Plan accordingly.
- Capture user attention and retain it with intuitive transitions and navigation. They’re not exactly children, but they too like chasing a few butterflies every now and then.
- Establish hierarchy using smart font and typography structure. Plan your website like you would the military. Uniform tells rank, no further questions asked.
- Visuals and iconography must be catchy and relevant. We are a visual lot. Pictures are really worth a thousand words.
- Load them fast. One…two…you lost a customer. Chop Chop.