Website Design and Digital Trends for 2014 - Part 2

Mark Reinholz from Yorkshire digital agency Vital Technology Group continues his discussion on the digital and web trends for 2014.
 
HARROGATE, U.K. - Jan. 15, 2014 - PRLog -- In terms of website development and design trends, 2014 looks set to build on the themes of 2013.

Large background images will continue to find a place in a website and new programming advances and increased network speeds will encourage developers to take this one step further with the introduction of video backgrounds.

Single page websites will become more acceptable and the influence of social media means users will become familiar with scrolling beyond the fold; continuous scrolling will, therefore, pave the way for fixed header bars and parallax scrolling.

Responsive website design will simply become expected and "flat" user-interfaces will mimic the latest operating systems.

The decision of whether or not a company should incorporate any of the anticipated design trends just described is not going to give an organisation a significant commercial advantage.

The key (and the challenge) will be a company’s ability to harness the power of digital and deliver timely content and a unique customer experience time and time again.

Your customers now have more influence than ever and are dictating that smartphone devices and social networks become the gateways to our organisations so the way we harness and manage this "influence" will be the biggest digital factor for many years to come.

While the themes for design are clear and the standards for content production very apparent, the impact of content management has gone largely unnoticed until recently.

In July 2013, WordPress spokesperson stated that 18.9 per cent of the web was running on that platform and the application was seeing a threefold increase in the number of new signs-up via mobile.

Whether the figures are accurate or not, WordPress is one of many impressive content management engines freely available; so apart from the obvious attraction, what are the other benefits that are signalling the demise of bespoke website development and what should you look for in the ideal content management platform?

Bespoke website development won't ever disappear completely because some companies require a very distinct look that simply can’t be achieved through a CMS; on the flip side, marketeers can be sometimes mislead by claims of cost free platforms with unrivalled flexibility; yes there are countless plugins offering endless functionality but incorporating these into your website can have financial implications.

Moving forward, open standards will become a real priority and developers will need to serve marketeers and not IT departments.

Web experience management (WEM) is a concept being fully embraced by developers and marketeers alike. To gain competitive advantage companies will learn to leverage content management platforms intelligently to collect data about their users to create an ecosystem that allows them to narrowcast their messaging and promotions to specific groups or individuals.

Generic content will become a thing of the past; websites will become personal experiences as users give away more and more information and this will undoubtedly aid the process of lead scoring as more and more application integration takes place.

However, the biggest challenge of WEM will perhaps be a marketeer's requirement to serve the huge mobile internet market.

Desktop experiences create certain opportunities to target site visitors but mobile is presenting yet another challenge. Content management platforms make it easy to create content suitable for mobile devices yet, according to Adobe, more than 45 per cent of businesses do not even have a mobile friendly or responsive website.

Mobile usage gives up massive amount of data, in addition to the obvious contextual clues such as location and time of day, and mobile devices in coming years will have access to a user’s vital signs, transactional history and social media interactions.

Marketeers will need to ensure that all development and content is, not only, mobile friendly but understand that it will most likely be consumed on smart devices.

2014 will definitely be the year that social media becomes mobile. Of Twitter 218M monthly users, 163.5M are mobile users and 65 per cent of ad sales come via mobile.

YouTube states that mobile makes up 40 per cent of its global watch time and 75 per cent of Facebook’s users access the service through mobile with nearly half of its revenues coming through mobile ads.

According to a survey from EPiServer, the biggest return on mobile today is from increased customer loyalty and personalisation, rather than mobile transactions.

Mobile won't ever completely replace desktops and neither will content management platforms completely replace bespoke website development, but with consumers dictating delivery platforms and software developers providing unlimited integration opportunities marketeers are having to work even harder to retain a customer’s attention.

Content management is a flexible and mostly cost-effective solution, initially designed to give companies autonomy, but at Vital Online Studio we are being approached more and more to help our clients manage existing websites that are built on content management engines in an attempt to help meet the demands of the customers.

We are simply helping them leverage the technology and to manage the huge amount of data that is readily available, so in 2014 we expect to see more and more of the marketing budget focused on digital management.

Contact
Vital Technology Group
mark.reinholz@vital.co.uk
01423 796290
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