There is always something new in web design, and staying ahead of the latest technology trends is essential in the web design business.
While most new trends will be of little use or interest to many clients, it is interesting to see what developments have been going on.
The website Built With (builtwith.com) analyses websites all over the world to see what new and emergent technologies are in use.
This list shows the current 10 most popular emergent web technologies.
1. ORIENTATION
This might seem a bit of a weird new trend, given the importance of responsiveness in a modern website to enable it to display on all devices, but sometimes, defining the orientation is useful.
In our smart devices (phones and tablets) there is an accelerator that aligns the screen depending on the orientation of the device; it switches between portrait and landscape modes when you rotate the device.
This enables us to create better user experiences because it offers an additional layout with a simple turn of a device, and without pressing any buttons.
However, designing for device orientation brings various challenges and requires careful thinking. The experience must be as unobtrusive and transparent as possible, and we must understand the context of use for this functionality.
It is probably a code used more often on single pages within a site than for an entire website, and very handy if you need to control the user experience.
Nearly all websites benefit from being designed for device orientation, but every so often there is a page or a function that will work much better in one orientation. For example, a video or a slideshow might look much better in landscape.
2. NEW RELIC
New Relic is a tracing and analytics application that uses a dashboard to monitor the health, availability and user experience on a site.
It’s expensive, but if you really need to know, in real time, what the traffic is uup to on your site, it might be uesful.
I suspect the reason it is at number 2 is because news sites, entertainment sites and political sites have been adopting it recently.
3. Google Universal Analytics Usage Statistics
One of my personal favourites and something I build into every site; this script measures how users interact with your website. It is new development of the well known Google tracking code, with additional flexibility for developers to customise it.
4. Device Width
A very useful code that overcomes that annoying issue we often see with an embedded document, form or picture requiring you to scroll right to see it all on a small screen.
This code allows the programmer to define the maximum width of the object.
5. CDN – Content Delivery Network
Useful for extremely high demand websites, a content delivery network a group of servers deployed in multiple data centres around the world. The purpose is to serve content to end-users with high availability and high speed.
Appropriate for very high volume news sites, entertainment sites and political sites.
6. WordPress 4.5
No surprise here. This is by far the most popular website technology being used today.
Massively flexible and with a brilliant user interface, nothing comes close to WordPress.
WordPress 4.5 is the latest release.
7. Facebook Custom Audiences
This script allows you to select customised audiences from your website that you can then target with Facebook ads and posts.
It does require that the viewer of your website agree to a privacy statement allowing you to track their movements though, so unless you are offering a service people want to be regularly updated on, such as a healthcare blog or a fashion site, it might be seen as something of a barrier for some users.
8. GSAP
A suite of tools for scripted, high-performance HTML5 animations that work in all major browsers.
9. Yahoo Dot
A simple way to measure and improve customer engagement across online campaigns.
For an advertiser who spreads their message and brand through multiple places, Yahoo Dot offers a single tag that enables improved ad effectiveness across search and native ads.
10. Comodo SSL
Comodo SSL (Secured Socket Layer) is an internet security certificate. Using a Secured Socket Layer enables a secure and encrypted connection on the Internet.
Once complicated, now it is easy, thanks to Comodo. And that, combined with a lower cost than older competitors, is probably why it ranks at number 10.