Izzy James
Digital Marketing
How your website is presented and formatted can influence how your audience behaves online, so keeping it updated with the latest trends will keep you ahead of competitors and in your customer’s good books.
Web development is constantly changing and evolving to fit the consumer’s needs and the latest internet technology, so both understanding your customers so you can plan and being reactive to change are important.
In this blog, we will be breaking down some of the top predicted trends for this year and what this could mean for your business.
Voice Navigation Control/Voice Search
Voice search and navigation is one of the top web development trends we expect to see this year to reduce the need for texting/typing. This has been on the rise for a couple of years now, and with most homes having at least one Alexa, it’s not difficult to see why. Voice navigation will allow website users to move across a site more efficiently by eliminating the need for typing/texting, ultimately increasing user experience on a website. With the growing demand for voice search, search engines are now factoring this element into ranking; the easier your website is to navigate, the higher your SEO ranking will be.
You can talk to your web developers to ensure your website is built in a way that responds well to voice search; you may also want to adjust some of your text and phrases for more casual speech and queries as this is what many people would be using.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Chatbots
This trend will help see more accessible communication between companies and their customers, introducing live chats. Again, not a new feature but one that is going to see a resurgence in 2022.
Easier communication with chatbots will help increase user experience. Any questions or queries can be answered promptly, which could take a couple of days to resolve using emails and contact forms. When questions and enquiries are responded to faster, this can help generate more sales conversions. Additionally, chatbots can increase customer engagement as customers will recognise the ease of conversations. You can also use chatbot data to evaluate insights on what most customers look for on websites, so this could be a beneficial trend to utilise.
Before implementing this trend, we advise you to think about your customers and how they like to communicate and what staff is available to control this chat. You can always trial a live-chat feature to review the outcome if you are unsure.
Mobile-first Development
This is definitely not a new thing and has been around for years, but would you believe some websites are still not mobile responsive? An issue we’re starting to see more of in years are websites that are slow on mobile and not optimised for Google, so this is something your web developer should have in mind when building and maintaining your site.
57% of global webpage views were on mobile in August 2021. The most traffic is from mobile devices, so it’s important to utilise a mobile-first web development approach. You can do this by optimising your website to run on mobile devices as well as web browsers on computers. For example, your website’s content will need to fit on a mobile screen and not lose usability when opened on a mobile device. Mobile-friendly websites tend to rank higher in SEO than websites that aren’t. We advise that you contact a web developer to ensure your website is mobile friendly.
Dark Mode UI
Dark mode is becoming immensely popular in the digital world and has many benefits alongside it. Dark mode reduces blue light, saves battery life, makes UI content accessible and legible to all and even lowers eye strain, even in low light conditions. In the long run, dark mode may increase user experience on websites that utilise it, as users will have reduced effects when staring at a screen for a long period of time. Some websites may be solely dark mode, but others may give users an option to switch to dark mode if they choose to; this is an option entirely up to the creator.
If you are unsure about this change, you can implement a trial that allows your website visitors to switch to dark mode if they would like to; from this, you can review how popular it is with your visitors and decide if you will go ahead with the change.
If you want more information about anything we mentioned in this blog, please contact us here and we can guide you through these trends.