Web Predictions and Trends for 2015

Last year I made many web predictions for 2014. I recently wrote a blog post covering the results of those trends and what we felt were accurate or in-accurate. Here are my predictions that I think will dictate the web in 2015.

WordPress Will Become More Enterpise Level

 
Many people have been writing about this for sometime now. If you look at the demand for WordPress compared to the other major CMS platforms, it is simply exploding. Some are even losing major traction, like Joomla, which has fallen into third place compared to WordPress and Drupal as far as developer use and new demand for the platform.
From my personal experience, many companies are moving away from Drupal to WordPress because it is easier and less expensive to manage / improve. Its old connotations and associations with being a blogging platform with security problems are going away as plugins like wordfence and modern themes / updates to the software allow it to become a full-blown CMS.
With enterprise services like WordPress VIP, WordPress is also a much more scalable platform. I have heard of problems with scaling WordPress but I have never personally run into them. I would love to try a project difficult enough to cause such a problem, but until that happens, I don’t buy the lack of scalability knock on WordPress. I definitely agree that it is not the best choice for certain projects but for most websites it is a great choice, even larger sites with enterprise demands. There are already many major sites that have scaled WordPress successfully and I see more doing so in 2015 and beyond.
As long as you are careful with plugins and update your software, security should not be an issue, either. The only breaches I see are bad themes, weak passwords, plugins that were not updated as well as older WordPress versions that were not up to date. Ultimately, I see WordPress becoming the de-facto CMS for non-eCommerce sites, with 2015 being a major year for solidifying its presence as the go-to platform.

More Service Companies Will Transition to eCommerce

 
More and more companies are realizing that staying competitive in the marketplace requires investing in your website and online presence. This includes transitioning to eCommerce. I truly believe that in the next twenty years every business will have to have some form of eCommerce / online portal to be successful. Currently, most people think of eCommerce as selling products online, but it will become more common to have services allow you to book an appointment and pay for that service online, even if it is not a physical product.
Allowing your customers to purchase your goods and services online will make nearly every company far more efficient. It does three major things to help your business.

1. It makes it easier for your customers to buy from you
2. It saves you customer service time, decreasing business costs
3. It offers more granular information about your products and services for your customers to access via the Internet

In today’s ultra competitive business world, these are three things your business cannot afford to miss out on. It will become necessary for almost all businesses to find a way to sell their products and services online, regardless of whether they have a physical product or a service. Businesses that fail to properly transition and make their online presence felt will find themselves falling behind the competition; trying to play catch up will be a costly uphill battle.

Software Integrations Will Become The Norm

 
More and more companies are asking us to integrate third party software into their website. I believe the future of websites will be a strong combinations of integrations making the website CMS the hub of all of this information connecting to it. Businesses need their CRM, ERP, ATS, and many other types of software integrated into their website to become more efficient.
Manually entering data into multiple pieces of software is slow and inefficient. We are integrating many different product data feeds into Magento websites because customers simply do not have the time or manpower to manually update their product data in multiple places. Third party software like Etilize and Salsify can do this well allowing Magento to serve as a CMS that pulls in all this data rather than having to enter it manually into Magento.
It will also become more necessary to rely on services like Salsify, Salesforce, Mailchimp, Microsoft Dynamics, and other cloud services. Therefore integrating all of these services into your website will ultimately make your business more efficient. This will be the future and a trend we see growing very fast at Trellis.

Social Media Advertising Growth Will Outpace Search Advertising Growth

 
More and more people are turning to Facebook, Twitter, and other social platforms to get news and learn about what is going on in the world. Social media is becoming so successful on so many fronts that search will have trouble keeping up with social media’s insane boom. Social media platforms will also have more and more data making them closer and closer to search engines. Websites like Buzzsumo are essentially a search engine for social media. You can find and search topics / influencers that get the most social shares and buzz.
I still think the search industry has a long way to grow, but social media will grow even faster to become just as powerful an influence in the tech world. Because of this, social media companies will begin to invest in search, cutting into the major search giants: Google, Bing, and Yahoo. Pinterest launched their new advertising platform, and Youtube advertising has been exploding over the past several years with insane growth at over 50% in some of those years. Overall, social media is a place most major companies are looking to invest more heavily in 2015, whereas search advertising is a much more mature place to advertise that simply will not see as fast a growth rate.

Online Dating Will Become Normal

 
Supposedly up to one third of current marriages are attributed to online dating. This is up from the “supposed’ 20% statistic from a few years ago. I find this to already be an astonishingly high number. With new mobile dating apps like Tinder, Hinge, and Coffee Meets Bagel, online dating has become far less taboo for the 20-30 year old age group.
It’s already no longer considered out of the ordinary to meet someone from Tinder or Hinge, as it might have been a couple of years ago. In 2015 more and more people will get used to meeting people from online dating to the point that it will simply be normal. The mobile dating apps are a brand new industry that is ready to explode.
If companies can find a way to tap into the market that these new online dating services have created, there will be some incredible business opportunities. I believe some of the current dating sites like OkCupid, Zoosk, Match.com and others, already have online advertising platforms. This could be a great revenue stream as every person on the site is most likely single and has a lot of data about them for advertisers to target.

Companies That Don’t Invest Online Will Start To Fail

 
I personally believe this is already happening. Borders closed not long ago, and other companies that did not learn to become competitive within the Internet era have already failed such as Blockbuster, a business that failed to properly adapt and was replaced by Netflix and other services like on-demand. I think 2015 will be the year that every business will feel the flex of the Internet muscle.
The companies that do not have a good website, a strong SEO presence, advertise on social media, spend money on PPC, have an email marketing campaign, or invest online in some form will start to die off. There is no way to stay competitive if consumers can find and utilize the Internet much more efficiently to buy from your competition.
The Internet has become so pervasive and this newest round of smartphones, the S5 and Iphone 6 are a major step forward in computing power. Mobile computing has matured significantly, and even traditional PC’s and labtops have become fairly cost effective but also powerful at the same time. Tablets are also maturing and are in their fourth or fifth generation.
2015 is essentially the 20-year anniversary of the modern Internet. There was not much you could do online before 1995, and now it is arguably the largest industry changer of all time. Everyone is accustomed to using it to find what he or she wants to buy or what company they want to go with. Therefore, consumers will become more aligned with companies they have a good online experience with. Companies that offer a bad online experience will lose the consumer trust and loyalty of those who may not have cared about an online experience as much in the past. Even services like Happy Speedy or Madtown Munchies will become more pervasive.

Mid Size Companies Will Move To Cloud Hosting

 
Google just launched their cloud hosting services, and more and more companies are offering cloud-hosting services to compete with one of the first major players to do so, Amazon Web Services. Now it is possible to choose from Amazon, Google, IBM, Microsoft, and other major companies for cloud hosting. There are also services like Engine Yard who have built convenient platforms on top of services like Amazon web services. Magento even recently partnered with Microsoft’s Azure to expand their cloud hosting offerings.
I believe cloud hosting will become so cheap that businesses like Google and Microsoft will employ it as a tool to win users and to up-sell them with other add-on services. Cloud hosting will soon be the norm, and as the Internet grows in prominence, businesses will need a platform that can help their website scale traffic growth, which is exactly the issue that cloud hosting solves. With computing power becoming more affordable every year, it is no surprise that more and more businesses will move away from traditional hosting packages and towards cloud hosting.

Foundation Will Become a Stronger Leader in Responsive Design Frameworks

 
There are many responsive web design frameworks, however, the two most heavily used frameworks are Foundation and Bootstrap. Bootstrap is the most used and widely known responsive framework, yet Foundation has started to gain some ground. As an enterprise responsive framework, Foundation offers more flexibility and features for scaling a responsive website. Good developers are starting to realize this.
As the web grows and businesses need to get more out of their website as a business tool, the stronger and more scalable responsive framework will prevail. In this case, Foundation has a lot of front-end features that Bootstrap does not, and this will cause more and more developers to move towards Foundation and away from Bootstrap as the framework of choice. This is not to say bootstrap is a bad responsive framework, simply that foundation is making major grounds as the premier responsive framework in the industry. Additionally, Foundation is backed by Zurb, an amazing design firm that is constantly working to improve it, whereas Twitter Bootstrap is not a main focus of any major company.

Mobile On Demand Services Will Become More Diverse

Mobile on demand services such as Uber, Lyft, Tinder, and new services like Shortcut allow you to get a haircut on demand by requesting a barber that comes to your house or work place. More and more services will become available by simply pressing a button on your phone to request a service that comes to you. It won’t be long before tailors, dry cleaners, and other services come to you rather than vice-versa.
There are already many mobile food-ordering platforms like Foodler and Grubhub. I truly believe grocery shopping is a major area that can grow online. It is a tedious task that can take a lot of time for a busy person who doesn’t have much of it. There are already apps for ordering groceries that exist like Peapod, however they are not as user friendly or convenient as they could be, but I believe that will change in 2015 and beyond.
Ultimately the web has changed the game for business. You can now immediately demand a service with the click of a button and most services and industries will have to adapt to this level of convenience or risk becoming obsolete. 2015 will be a major year in which mobile on-demand services will grow tremendously.

Web Design Trends Will Be More Visual and Less Text Content Oriented

 
The trend towards hero images, background videos and other visual assets that guide the user through the website will become even more common than today. Traditional text heavy websites are quickly becoming a thing of the past, and more image driven and visual websites are becoming the norm.
Major web design trends like Parallax scrolling that have huge background images and a few bullets point or headers for text will cause more and more businesses to adopt this style. Thus, users will become inclined to go to websites with less text heavy web pages as they will see these type of websites as modern, while text heavy websites will come across as old and cumbersome.
The average user already quickly scans a webpage for exactly what they want, and is unlikely to read a lot of text on a homepage. Therefore, sites that have strong visual assets and easily scannable content that guides users to the right converting places will most likely see strong results from their website. This will push websites to move forward with this trend because when executed properly, this design trend should result in higher conversions and a better experience for users.

Digital Currencies Will Become More Mature

 
Bitcoin, the most used digital currency, made a huge run-up at the end of 2013 to about $1000 per bitcoin. Since then it has slowly declined, hanging around the $200 to $300 dollar mark for sometime now. Although many would see this as a sign of a fad declining, there are many reasons for this decline, which point towards a maturing trend in digital currencies.
Major entities, like Amazon, Microsoft, WordPress, Overstock.com, Paypal, Subway, and other large companies are beginning to accept Bitcoin. Each year more Bitcoin are mined thus increasing the supply, which ultimately decreases the price if demand for Bitcoin does not increase in tandem with that increase in supply. This will happen until the Bitcoin supply reaches 21 million Bitcoins, which is expected to happen in the next two to three decades. Additionally, more businesses are accepting Bitcoin who then in turn convert that Bitcoin into dollars that their businesses run on, also decreasing the price.
These two factors have contributed significantly to the decrease in price, however more and more businesses accepting Bitcoin is a factor that shows that digital currencies are maturing. I personally believe, and this prediction could be off by a few years, that 2015 will be a year in which Bitcoin and other digital currencies see a resurgence as opposed to the sharp declines they saw throughout all of 2014. I do see it possibly declining further, but at a certain point it will bottom out and return back upwards to a more stable increasing rate rather than the unsustainable exponential growth in 2013. This is when I see digital currencies mature to a point of strong investment value and business utility, and 2015 very well could be that year.

Magento 2.0 Will Be An eCommerce Gamechanger

 
Last but not least is Magento 2.0. Anyone that is majorly invested in Magento is aware of Magento 2.0. However, how much Magento 2.0 changes the game for the eCommerce industry is uncertain. It does have a developer release already out, and as a Magento development agency we already have the luxury of looking at the code and beta platform. What we see so far is impressive.
Magento 2.0 features a much more intuitive and user friendly admin panel, in addition to some major technological upgrades that will make it a far more efficient platform to develop on. This will make it less expensive to build more advanced and scalable Magento websites, and allow upgrading Magento to be much easier. I see this improving the eCommerce landscape as eCommerce continues to become a dominant force in business.
Businesses will have to invent into their online presences, especially ones that face major eCommerce competition, and Magento 2.0 offers a new and unbelievable opportunity for any business investing in eCommerce. Magento is already the only competitive Enterprise eCommerce software that boasts both a free, open source edition, and a cost effective Enterprise edition that is a great value compared to other major Enterprise eCommerce platforms like Demandware and Hybris. The improvements to Magento 2.0 will be a game changer from both an admin panel user and developer stand point because of the new technology stack being used and more intuitive and user friendly business admin panel. This will open up new doors for many businesses that take the leap to Magento 2.0.