Web Trends and Predictions for 2016

Modular Design Will Take Over:

Many smaller companies do not have brand guidelines or a style guide to follow. However, most established companies have invested into some sort of branding materials that helps execute and implement consistency across many marketing & sales channels.
The web is becoming so diverse and so difficult to control across multiple devices, browsers, and other variables that it is getting more and more difficult to ensure your brand stays consistent throughout the web. Thus comes the need for modular design, which can help ensure a company has brand consistency across all web channels, multiple websites and types of web pages, as well as allow for more rapid development of new website initiatives.
Let me introduce you to two applications, Bootstrap and Foundation, that allow websites to be built in a much more modular fashion. This is because specific front end components of the website can be built out utilizing frameworks like Foundation and Bootstrap. The components can also be built to the specific colors, spacing, sizing, and other variables that are unique to your brand.

This is what could be considered a web style guide, which is something that creates modular components such as menus, forms, buttons, modals, and other reusable components to create new website pages and initiatives by simply piecing together these components. The reasoning behind all that is to help a business keep their brand consistent across multiple devices and channels. The end goal here is to have the components be designed to be responsive, and supportive consistently through all devices sizes and browsers that are necessary for your brand to be effective on the web.
Businesses will find it more and more necessary to invest in the modular design components that will allow them to build new website pages and initiatives faster than ever before to stay competitive in the rapid evolving Internet commerce ecosystem.

The Internet Of Things Will Mature:

I have never really paid a lot of attention to the Internet Of Things because I felt it was too early for such devices to really become useful and affordable for the common person. I felt it was like buying a laptop or computer pre GUI era in which everything was basically just a command line, not useful or efficient for the average human.
However, I believe 2016 will be a pivotal year for the Internet of Things and connected devices because the technology has become more affordable and useful in many different ways. Even devices such as sprinklers are becoming smart devices and the diversity of such devices will continue to grow.

Effective Social Media Advertising Will Become Necessary:

Here, can we all agree that the heading basically speaks for itself. If you don’t join the most recent social media sites in order to create brand awareness, does your company even exist? One of the most important steps in the process to making social media advertising effective is to know who you are trying to reach.

Paid Advertising vs Non-paid Advertising

Of course non-paid advertising sounds great, but what are you missing by keeping your wallet shut? A large advantage of paying to gain awareness is that the results happen much faster and usually at an accelerating pace which, then leads to a higher amount of sales and profit for your company. Another tactic that more companies have been looking into is the option of geo-targeting and personalized ad targeting in which you can target specific personas in different target geographies.
Now because the internet is so vast, not having to pay for advertising has really worked out in certain company’s favors. Trusted brands on Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat and so on are gaining huge momentum and capitalizing on the free advertising. Please don’t get confused here, you can pay to advertise on Twitter and Instagram but you can also do it for free. Depending on how many followers you have, 100, 500, 1,000, 10,000+ maybe, a percentage of people that follow you are going to see that post, and if someone likes what they see, they will either have the urge to “Like it” or “Retweet it” creating brand engagement. However, Facebook in particular has updated its algorithm heavily to reduce the number of people that see your organic posts requiring brands and businesses to invest more into Facebook advertising to reach more of their followers or new people.

B2B eCommerce Will Take Storm:

Over the past five years, B2B eCommerce has sky rocketed in demand to become the most efficient way for business to business organizations to stay competitive in the digital world, becoming a multi trillion dollar worldwide industry. This will be largely increased by the large purchases that businesses are making online rather than over the telephone or even what used to be a common form of transactions, face-to-face. The most attractive aspect about eCommerce for B2B organizations are the cost savings, “B2B companies can slash the costs of serving and selling to customers by as much as 90% by introducing self-service e-commerce features.”

Source: Internetretailer.com

Personalized Shopping Will Become Normal:

Speaking as a conventional online shopper I can attest to the fact that having the websites I visit when looking for products “know” me makes the experience more enjoyable. Little things such as email notifications about deals that I have earned just because I made a past purchase with their company will increase my chances of then making another purchase just because of that email. “Personalization of emails is much more popular and well received than personalization of display advertising, with 66 percent of U.S. consumers welcoming email retargeting.”

Source: Momentology.com

The VC Bubble Will Begin to Burst:

The venture capitalist bubble has become quite obese within the past couple of years, and it’s not looking too hot. The ones that are pointing this out are the people who’ve seen it all, the investors and even owners of the fortune 500 companies, and frankly they aren’t too happy with their loss of investors. What I mean by that is, there are too many start up companies that aren’t meeting their yearly quota and are just using their investors money to try to stay afloat when it could be going to multi-million dollar companies doing research on things like rare diseases.
However, the main reason is the VC bubble came about because interest rates were so low and money needed to go elsewhere, into private companies and stocks to generate strong returns. Now that interest rates are beginning to rise again or even seem to be on the cusp of rising again, investors are realizing dumping money into startups successful might not last too much longer.

WooCommerce Will Move Upstream:

WooCommerce now has the most eCommerce sites of any platform with over one million sites. Crazy right? In a very short period WooCommerce is starting to take massive market share of the smaller eCommerce sites, as you can see here:

With so many websites now using WooCommerce, the community behind is now much stronger. More enterprise features and plugins for WooCommerce are being developer and larger organizations can therefore rely on it to power their web stores.

Javascript Frameworks Will Mature:

Frameworks like AngularJS, React, Ember, and more have grown in popularity. However, they are still relatively new technologies and their prominence among traditional websites that don’t have a massive developer team are still somewhat low. I believe 2016 will be a major year in which Javascript frameworks will begin to mature and start to become more useful for everyone simpler websites, however this transition may take several years to play out. Ultimately the web is moving to a faster more single page app type of experience where it is more efficient not to reload the page every time and Javascript frameworks help execute this.

Facebook Will Reign Supreme:

One thing that keeps Facebook at the top of the all time favorite social media sites is the fact that it is able to have its users adapt to any sort of public changes that it implements. This social networking site is the largest of its kind, towering over Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest in terms of business value and total usage. Facebook’s future is only looking up for 2016, in fact there doesn’t look like there’s even a slight possibility of there being a decline in Facebook users because of what it does for them. It allows users to keep in contact with everybody on their friend list whether it’s personal or professional, a picture, a blog, or a share, Facebook does its job well by keeping its 1 billion daily users occupied.

Source: Statista.com 

The Cloud Will Take Over:

The main reason cloud comping as a type of digital infrastructure has been extremely successful is the overall idea of it; being able to access information on demand from a large infrastructure of safely secured and well taken care of servers. For example, if you are a manager who runs a sales team of 30 people, wouldn’t it be helpful to have just 1 document of information where all 30 of those people entered in their monthly progress? Of course it would!
Imagine if, as a manager, at the end of every month you received 30 different emails in your inbox, each individually containing your team’s monthly numbers and then having to enter that in to a spread sheet to compare to last months data that is somewhere else on your computer. With cloud computing online services can access massive amounts of server power at a much lower cost creating web services on demand such as Salesforce that solve this problem in the cloud.
Cloud Computing has taken over in two major ways – Cloud Hosting Service (Amazon Web Services) and Cloud based non hosting services such as Salesforce, Dropbox, and many other services. This trend will continue as more businesses will move to cloud hosting and cloud based services like Dropbox.