Top 10 website development trends in 2021 Now that the year is coming to an end, what were the top 10 website development trends in 2021? What design, copy or media elements defined the year or maintained their dominance? If you’re pressed for time, we see the standout trends as: COVID-19 policies & procedures pages become standard practice. Artificial Intelligence and bots help with UX and customer service. Single Page Application (SPA) sites increase in popularity. Mobile-first development is now the norm but watch out for Apple users. Serverless applications and architecture enable remote working. Product test automation reduces development costs. Motion UI harnessed to funnel users through the journey. IoT dominates the boardroom with web crossover. Content optimised for voice search first. Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) plugin saves dev costs. We’ll sort them into the three key development areas of mobile-first, pandemic related and UX inspired trends and provide a bit more flavour to their emergence below. Mobile-first trends More than half of all internet traffic is mobile now. We don’t even need to link you to the reports, intuitively you know. Chances are your own browsing habits have migrated to mostly mobile in recent years. So, it’s obvious that Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), Mobile-First Development and Single Page Application (SPA) are leading the charge in design for phones. We expect these trends to continue with good web development focused on near-instant mobile load speeds, rapid conversion and streamlined UI. Lastly, recent changes by Apple on user privacy rules on their devices have changed a lot about what can be tracked now. Essentially not much is passed on to advertisers, websites and merchants any longer, so it’s a space to watch as well. Pandemic-related Privately and in the corporate world, COVID has changed our lives forever. Safety precautions are now listed on nearly every website and our work from home directives have informed tech. AWS (AWS Lambda), Google Cloud (Google Functions) and Microsoft Azure (Azure Functions) lead the charge on serverless computing allowing commerce and business to continue uninterrupted. And collaboration service partners like Cisco are already thinking about syncing their tech with any return to the office with IoT devices like the Cisco Webex Board. We’ve also cut out unnecessary costs in support through automation and bots to help with testing and customer service. UX-focused Artificial Intelligence and bots now dominate the first-touch response for many businesses. They help direct users to resources or manage workflows for service departments. But design is contributing to the user experience too. According to InVision, “motion helps make UIs expressive and easy to use, it’s one of the newer members of the UI design family.” But with new, vast SASS libraries, that’s becoming less of a concern. Lastly, all content is slowly becoming optimised for natural language as sites compete for ‘position zero’ across search engines and home devices. Want Alexa or Google Home to read your content as a result? You’ll need to write for a natural voice response. Want to talk about design, UX or anything else on the internet? Our expert team is standing by.
How to Choose Good Images for Website Sales Conversions The type of images you choose could be reducing your sales figures. Yes, that’s right! People respond to images in different ways and picking the wrong ones could put customers off your product. And it’s not just that. You could be reducing your overall web traffic if you don’t have any images. According to Jeff Bullas, “Articles with images get 94% more total views.” That’s a huge difference in traffic. But having good quality images will make a huge positive impact. So, if you’re wondering how to choose good images for website sales conversions, consider the following: Skip the cheezy, staged stock photos. Show real people having an emotion. Don’t just go with what you like, test it! Use the best quality and clarity image you can. Make it relevant to the content and true to the brand. Ban cheesy stock You know the ones. A comedically overstressed worker pulling at his hair, a frazzled housewife surrounded by messy toys or a smiling ethnically ambiguous woman clutching a shopping bag; these don’t really say anything new. Think about communicating a unique message. Look for photos that jump off the page at you. Scroll past any you feel you’ve seen before. There are loads of options for great free stock photos like Unsplash and Pixabay. Show real emotion People buy from people. Try to use human faces or human body parts wherever you can. This will help your visitor imagine themselves using your product or service. Try to show them what they’ll feel when you solve their problem. Oh and it never hurts if the people in your images resemble your target audience too. Test, test, test Often, people just pick an image they like and go with it. They never actually stop to think if this image will resonate with the customer. One way to test this is to have multiple versions of the same landing page with different images. Keep the one that performs the best. Do this with every page on your site for the best results. Clear, high quality Even if you find the ‘perfect’ image, don’t bother with it if the resolution and quality are low. Today’s modern consumers are used to crisp, crystal imagery. Think of all the perfectly filtered Instagram images they scroll past each day. A poor quality image will do more harm than good. Just don’t chance it. Source another image. Totally relevant Not only should the image be relevant to the topic discussed within that element or article, but the brand should factor too. Think about your brand colours and values. If you’re a bright and fun brand you shouldn’t select dark-background imagery for example. There’s a visual disconnect there between the image and the overall page. They need to marry up. Images are very important to design and sales performance. But if you want more tips on how to improve your website SEO overall, check out our previous article.
What you might not know about SEO There are countless articles written about SEO every day. But most of them cover the same two topics: keywords and word count. However, there are some other key things to consider that have nearly just as much impact on your ranking. Here’s what you might not know about SEO: Use image alt attributes to let search engines understand what a picture is about. Write in an easy to understand way, just like you would talk. Set the heading types so search engines know how your page is structured. Configure the metadata to provide the most useful snipped of the page’s content. Alt Image Attributes Most people never bother to set up the alt text on their images. When you leave it blank, search engines don’t know what the image is, so they consider it a decorative item. This is a shame because you could be benefitting from valuable SEO juice by just setting an alt text. You need to describe what’s in the image, but that doesn’t mean it can’t contain your keywords. Think alt text like, “photo of a woman using our app to save money on car insurance.” If “save money on car insurance” is your longtail keyword, this is a great way to get more references in. Conversational Tone If you want to try for ‘position zero’ which usually gets read out by voice assistants and appears at the very top of google search results, you need to do a few things. One of the most important ones is to write in a conversational tone. That means, write as if you’re talking to someone. Answer the question (related to your longtail keyword) as naturally as possible in 40-60 words. And don’t keyword stuff, Google has software to recognise this now. Maybe you could add a few questions? Or start sentences in ‘grammatically-unconventional’ ways. Oh, and don’t use too many big words. Heading formats Another key to position zero is to use proper heading formats (especially with lists). Google needs to know how to display your content. So, only ever have one H1 heading as a first point. When you make an expanded list, put a one-sentence overview next to each point and set it as an H3 or H4. This tells Google that it can show those list headings to answer peoples questions, even if there is more information in between the points. Or you can provide an overview of what you’re going to talk about at the top of the article with your website editor’s in-built ‘list’ format like we’ve done here. Metadata Use Yoast or another plugin to quickly configure your page’s metadata. This helps search engines know what your page is about. It also provides a customised ‘overview’ snippet about the content. You’ll get a better click-through rate if you make it clear right away how you’ll answer a visitor’s question. Remember you should use a long-tail keyword in most instances. Your site can get dinged for having pages with duplicate ‘seeming’ content. So, longtails let you add that differentiation. That’s our list of what you might not know about SEO. Hopefully, that helped you with some tips you can use right away. Need more? Check out our previous article on SEO.
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