With web development being a staple in daily life for both business owners, young professionals and freelancers alike, it’s important to stay on top of the latest web development trends.
While some of the trends in web development are evergreen, there have been quite a few emerging technologies that have made the future of web development look even more innovative than the previous year. You will even find yourself revisiting some web development trends that were popular a couple years ago but are now making a comeback with a load of programming updates and improvements.
Take a look at these top trends in web development.
1. Vue JS Gaining Popularity
Vue has been around since 2014, but it has become increasingly popular this past year due to its fast and lightweight framework. One of Vue’s biggest benefits, when it was created, was that all their documentation was available in Chinese.
Nowadays, you can find it being used on popular company sites like Expedia, Alibaba, Nintendo, and GitLab. VueJS has also been listed as one of the “10 most-forked GitHub projects in 2017”.
2. Programming Benefits from JavaScript
Javascript continuously makes improvements. Functional programming, the process of building software based on fundamental principles, is one of its more recent improvements and it has made huge impacts.
The latest functional programming improvements in Javascript includes more predictable functional coding and functions. These function improvements include arrow functions to reduce boilerplates, object/array spread to avoid mutating objects, and async/await to avoid side effects.
3. Increased Extension Capability
While browser-extensions have been around for years, the latest this year will build off of the extensions to increase their compatibility. That means that code that has been written for a specific browser such as Chrome or Firefox can now be used on either browser. Soon Edge will also be able to use code that was initially created for Chrome and Firefox.
4. Real-Time Web Apps
The concept behind real-time web apps is the availability to share information instantly. Though these apps have been around for years, the digital age has made them grow in popularity. When the popularity grows, so do the improvements.
Previously, real-time web apps were only used in Node.js. Now, these apps can be found in Ruby on Rails and Javascript.
5. Progressive Web Apps
There has been a long-standing issue of trying to emulate web content on a mobile device. That issue has been resolved and another issue has been put in its place. That issue is now trying to emulate mobile content onto a web browser. That is where progressive web apps come in.
This latest trend strives to create the similar app-like experience you find on your phone, but now on a website. This now creates added benefits like making a user more prone to make the site their home screen, drastically decreased page load times, more engagement and higher conversion rates.
6. Mobile Web Development
In a mobile-first age, the necessity for a responsive website is now a key step in web development. It’s no wonder that one of the biggest web development trends of 2018 is how to master mobile web development. It is not a question of whether or not your website is mobile-friendly. The question is how mobile-friendly it truly is.
7. Material Design
Material design was developed by Google and is a new trend that has been gaining popularity in 2018. Based on a modern, responsive Materialize CSS framework, material design is attempting to combine visual material and motion. It comes in either Materialize and Sass, is compatible with most browsers and provides Parallax and Toast.
8. Chatbots
In case you’re unfamiliar, Chatbots are those little chatboxes that pop up in the corner of the window of a website you are visiting. They offer a wealth of help to both the visitor and the owner of the website by offering sales support or even customer service.
While this tool is already wildly popular, it is believed that there will be even more improvements to this tool. Read more about why chatbots are what makes it one of 2018’s web development trends to keep an eye out for.
9. Static Websites
A clean, visually pleasing, and incredibly basic website is a static website, and it has become a huge trend for 2018. Having a straightforward and minimalistic website may have been considered “lame” in the past, but minimalism has become a trend all over industries and web development is hopping on this trend as well.
What’s better about having a static website? It’s cheap!
10. Response Animation Idle Load (RAIL)
User-centric performance, also known as RAIL, has been around for over three years now. RAIL is still considered a fairly new concept that many haven’t yet used but is becoming more and more popular this year. Basically, RAIL strives to provide a great user experience when designing a website.
The acronym, Response Animation Idle Load, are the benchmarks that web developers look to ensure that they have met everything that a user of the website they are creating would look to in determining their satisfaction with a website.
Web Development Trends: Next Steps
There are many more web development trends to keep an eye out for this year but these are some of the top contenders to track for the rest of the year.
Some other trends you may want to check out include Modular Page Creation, Push Notifications, and Single Page Applications.
With the technology surrounding web development, you may never know, there could be a slew of new trends to start paying attention to before the year is even over!
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