With many of today's top Web designers being young, creative minds eager to push the boundaries of design, it's all too easy to overlook the user's needs. This is especially easy to do with websites whose audience may include one of the largest generations in America - the Baby Boomers - responsible for well over half of all consumer purchases made in the U.S.
With a new year comes exciting new possibilities. These often come in the form of resolutions, but here at Evolve, we took a stab at predicting how several of the key aspects of the Web world might change in 2012.
We're now entering yet another revolution of the Internet called Web 3.0. This time, the Web will transform into one massive database of information. For example, if you wanted to buy a used car today, you'd probably visit cars.com or autotrader.com to begin your search. With Web 3.0, the databases from all used car websites would be combined into one massive search engine.
Considering you're dealing with a device that doesn't have the memory or screen size of a desktop computer, your website needs to be optimized to display correctly on a phone. Imagine a user trying to access your current desktop site on a mobile device. Your current layout may look completely discombobulated, or the site may not even load at all.
Do you have a Constant Contact enewsletter sign up form on your website? If so, wouldn't it be cool if you could give your Facebook followers the opportunity to sign up right from your Facebook page?
In an economic down-turn where budgets and margins are tight, it's vital to capitalize on your offerings and keep an eye out on what the competition is doing. Thanks in large-part to the Internet, we have an abundance of tools to help us learn more about our competitors.
Let's face it. Web users are impatient, and grow increasingly so as the years pass. If you're lucky (and I mean really lucky), you'll get 3-8 seconds to grab their attention. That's because users don't read Web pages word-by-word. They scan. As a result, important website copy needs to hit hard and hit fast. It needs to be scannable, and there are a few good ways to accomplish this.
Two weeks ago, I noticed a billboard that caught my eye for several reasons, but mostly because it was a good case of billboard advertising gone wrong. Some of the issues may seem obvious, but let's really think about what's really going on here. Get ready for a full-on advertising autopsy.
Putting 301 redirects in place for every page or file name that's changing in a transition from an old to new site is how you tell search engines what's new and how to handle the old. Over time, they'll eventually remove the old links from their index and replace them with the updated ones. This is how you hold your ground when it comes to maintaining search rankings.
Web videos have been around for awhile, but this past year, they've really increased in both views and user-generated content uploads. As broadband penetration increases and the ability to easily upload videos to websites or social networks increases, we'll continue to see video content complimenting or flat-out replacing static text on a given Web page. After all, why read when you can watch.
