21 Web Development Trends For 2009
This list will keep all developers going for a little while. There are 21 top development trends for 2009 here. If there is anything i have missed then please feel free to drop in a comment. I would also like to say a special thanks to Louis Frankland over at Starlink UK, who has helped me out with this article. Thanks!
Rapid Development Platforms (eg. CodeIgniter, Django, RoR)
Rad (Rapid application development) is a type of software development methodology. It usually involves objects and components and makes jobs easier. Online applications such as CodeIgniter and Django use this type of software development methodology. You can find out more on Rad at Wikipedia.
Cloud Hosting
Cloud hosting or otherwise known as cloud computing is taking the internet by storm. Its a type of hosting which is dramatically scalable, so it can handle more-a-less any spikes of web traffic. Web hosts that offer this sort of service include the popular Mosso (The Rackspace Cloud), and Media Temple (Grid Service). Cloud hosting is very affordable to the average web developer. Cloud hosting will surely take over shared hosting.
Distributed Online Storage (Amazon S3)
Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) is designed to make web scaling easy for developers. S3 provides a web service that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data at any given time, from anywhere on the internet. Its infrastructure is very fast, highly scalable and very very cheap. Prices can go as low as $0.12 per GB of storage and $0.10 per GB transfer. One of the best features is you only pay for what you use! I suggest all developers should check out Amazon Simple Storage Service.
CSS Sprites
Quote from Alistapart “Back when video games were still fun (we’re talking about the 8-bit glory days here), graphics were a much simpler matter by necessity. Bitmapped 2-dimensional character data and background scenery was individually drawn, much like today’s resurgent pixel art. Hundreds and later thousands of small graphics called sprites were the building blocks for all things visual in a game.”
How does this come into the world wide web I hear you say? Check out Alistapart to find out.
Framework / Library
These allow developers to write code elegantly. For example jQuery a JavaScript framework, expands the built in features of JavaScript.
Browser/Desktop offline apps based on Adobe Air
Adobe Air is a cross-platform runtime environment for building rich internet applications. Air stands for Adobe Integrated Runtime, and uses Flash, Flex HTML and / or Ajax. Adobe air applications can be online or desktop based. Current applications based on adobe air include AOL, eBay and Yahoo!
Flash HD Streaming
High Definition Flash Streaming. Sounds good heh? Many websites are offering their content in HD thorough the flash player. Companies such as Youtube and Revision3 already do it.
Microsoft Silverlight Video Streaming
A quote from Microsoft “Microsoft Silverlight Streaming is a companion service for Silverlight that makes it easier for developers and designers to deliver and scale rich media as part of their Silverlight applications”. You can find out more about Microsoft Silverlight Streaming at the Official Website.
Remote Script Use
Loading scripts from a central location, like a direct link. This allows developers to call active server pages without having to refresh the page. More information over at Microsoft.
Single Input Orders
The ability to only fill out one form, then other sites and services will automatically remember your details when filling in forms, even if you haven’t filled in that certain form before.
SMS Interactive Solutions
Mobile devices and Smartphones such as the iPhone, Blackberrys, Nokia’s etc are all very powerful. But people with old phones with the ability of SMS can still update their web profiles such as Bebo, Facebook and twitter. Online social networks allow you to register your mobile number so that you can send text to the website which will automatically perform changes.
Push everything – email, IM, video, news
Push Technology makes things more instant. You don’t have to wait for your email client to update, or having to keep going to check your mail, it will automatically push it to you. This is already being done with websites such as Youtube, pushing things to users, such as oh I see you have watched this video, how about we recommend these that you may like?
Cross-site data sharing
Data sharing across sites, such as social networks / networks. Google already do this. Say if you login to your google account anywhere on the Google site, anywhere on Google you are still logged on.
Single LoginPprofiles (OpenID, Facebook connect)
Facebook connect is the new OpenID on the block. It was announced in late 2008. The idea behind OpenID and Facebook Connect is very simple. Allow third party websites to retrieve users details from a central location such as OpenID and Facebook Connect, when the user provides their username and password. This then gives the third party website a very large target audience, and eliminates the need for a database to store all their users information.
API’s for automating everything
Application Programming Interfaces that are fully automated is the way forward in 2009 for web developers. You can find out more about Application Programming Interfaces here.
Full AJAX CMS’s
Ajax was thought up in 2005, and in 2006 the W3C made it an official web standard. Similar Ajax techniques have been around since the 1990s. Throughout the last few years, I have seen more and more Ajax on the internet. In web forms, preloaders, slideshows and gallery’s. 2009 ModX is an ajax content management system, and I think other content management systems should adopt this technique.
SEO By Design
Don’t pay an S.E.O company. As long as you have Google site content, lots of value in your blog posts, all your alt tags are relevant to your topic in hand, your url’s are very friendly and your meta tags are relevant then your site will receive great search engine optimization. If you play the Google Game and try and cheat the system, then Google will cheat you and knock you down a few places for trying.
Free Everything! (give stuff away to make money)
You give a certain amount of stuff away for free, to reel your users in. You provide a good service, and have no big ads in their face to put them off. After a while your users will begin to like and even love your service, and best of all its free. They may recommend it to friends, and this gains you exposure.
So how do you make money I hear you asking? You then you offer your users extras, such as you currently have this, but for a small fee of $x amount per month / year, you have have this much. This will make you alot of money because you are providing a clean free service, and if users want more they pay for more. It is and will be a very big trend in 2009.
WAP only and phone only sites become more prominent
Many websites automatically detect if the user is browsing their site using a mobile device. If so then then a specific WAP / mobile website is displayed to the user. Not all websites do this, so in 2009 this trend needs to become more prominent.
CSS3 – Full Support and 3D in Browser Graphics
CSS is a web designers best friend for styling websites beautifully. But there are some things that web designers find hard to do, and need to find ways round tasks because many browsers don’t yet have full support for CSS3. You can find out more information about css3 over at the official website.
IE decides to adhere to normal standards
Designers and Developers can only wish for this to happen. Until then, theres always conditional tags for sytlesheet selection. Hope you have enjoyed reading this article!
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tiffany_bear (2 years ago)
cool! can i post a link of your blog to my blog?
Andy (2 years ago)
Sure
Tom Freeman (2 years ago)
Lots of nice ideas, except I think there is still a case for SEO companies and I wouldn’t write them off just yet. Having great content is one thing, but it needs to be written in a way which emphasises the keywords and phrases you are trying to target. Not being spammy, just good web writing. Also you need to build up a link profile, which is a very hard task and won’t happen by itself. Having great content is fantastic, but only if people know about it.
Andy (2 years ago)
Yeh, I think i worded that wrong. What I mean is dont shed out thousands of $s if you can do it yourself, like change titles, meta tags, alt tags etc. Spend the money on website advertising (like a 125px x 125px ad), that will get your site out there.
Brian Cray (2 years ago)
Good post, and I’m not sure I agree that website advertising is the best use of money. Banner blindness is a huge problem and banner ads don’t attract engaged visitors.
I’d also say that just because people can write title tags and keywords, doesn’t mean they can choose the RIGHT keywords. The RIGHT keywords can usually only be found with the keyword research tools.
I do agree that good content is the best policy for search marketing and much more important than meta tags
Steve - Make Money Online (2 years ago)
There are some great things mentioned here and eventually Google may include a lot of these when calculating its Google quality score. But for now I still believe optimizing pages and providing content rich web pages is still the key to traffic.
Steven Hart (2 years ago)
Great list! Kinda makes you feel good to be a web designer in this day and age. jQuery and CSS sprites really do make life easier
website design nyc (2 years ago)
very cool post
21 Web Development Trends For 2009 Web Design Tutorials | Shed Kits (2 years ago)
[...] 21 Web Development Trends For 2009 Web Design Tutorials Posted by root 22 hours ago (http://www.webdesigndev.com) Cool can i post a link of your blog to my blog reply to this comment what i mean is dont shed out thousands of s if you can do it yourself like change titles all rights reserved powered by wordpress designed by woo themes Discuss | Bury | News | 21 web development trends for 2009 web design tutorials [...]
praveen (2 years ago)
great article! I was expecting that you will include microformats too though.
praveen’s last blog post..7 random things about me
blessing (2 years ago)
What brought me to this site was the flash tutorial, but man, i’m loving everything else. This is an awesome article. Thanks!
Andy (2 years ago)
Great to hear man
Regge (2 years ago)
Good tips, very nice website. About WAP website, you mean serving a special CSS for the same XHTML standards complient file, don’t you? You don’t advise to run two (or more) versions of your content? That would be so 1999…
Cheers!
web design cape town (2 years ago)
You are spot on with the trends and there are really some interesting new ideas that we can apply.
Brilliant article!
Web designer (2 years ago)
I can’t agree that SEO is unnecessary. Good SEO campaign can help your site to archieve the first page in Google search. And this means your site will attract more visitors and may be potential customers (if ecommerce).
Brian (2 years ago)
No thanks to full ajax CMS’. MODx is sluggish and tries to do too much ajax to begin with. Just because we can doesn’t mean we should.
BTW, CodeIgniter is spelled wrong.
keif (2 years ago)
SEO by design is an assumption – it should be by design, but not everyone is a wizard that can run with this themselves – often times it starts out well, and goes downhill because post-design/development it gets destroyed.
WAP sites? No, I have to disagree. Mobile devices are becoming more powerful, I see the mobile browser becoming more powerful to be able to handle sites better – I can see TOP sites maybe optimizing, but it’s falling on a combination of WIFI phone connections increasing, better data connections on phones, and flash capabilities that will decide if “mobile” versions become more prevalent or not.
Actually, a few of these aren’t so much “trends” as “much talked about but seldom used…”
Website Design (2 years ago)
I stumbled on your blog by accident and now I’m glad I did. As a roofer, I have to say I really enjoy the articles and posts you have here.
Thanks !
Harry
Ber2 (2 years ago)
Great article. Thanks for the sharing.
chandra (2 years ago)
Nice this is valuable for me
Linda (2 years ago)
Hi, Andy. Could you tell me how a CPA website is developed? Which software are best suited and which ones are upcoming? I am an accountant and I got to know about Emochila (http://www.emochila.com), a few months ago. My website has really been worked well but the efficient staff at Emochila., specially the accounting software that they have added to my system is giving good results. I don’t know the technicalities, but still would suggest Emochila to all those who are looking for an expert web designing firm in the US.
public relations branding (2 years ago)
Just bookmarked your site. Thank you!!
Myfacefriends (2 years ago)
nice collection thanks!
julius domingo (2 years ago)
In the future, the combined technologies of dynamic augmented reality, high definition for nano screen output device, advanced 3D technology, satellite 3d imaging of the world combined with technology such as lucid viewer and super high definition video cameras to capture the world in reality, advanced brain waves input devices, faster internet connection, faster processors will enable us to build a real digital world. With just a high definition contact lens projecting what we see in the digital world, a head set getting the brain waves in our head as input for navigation and all actions. The full digital world will let us communicate to people from all walks of life, a built in translator will let it possible for us to talk to foreigners with ease. Navigation will be teleportation, or if you are not in a hurry, you can fly and its up to you how fast you want to go. Security will be like in the real world, you have control over who gets inside your house, you will also have control on who gets to see you when youre outside the house. -thoughts of a web developer researching about augmented reality. hahahahah
easy money from internet (2 years ago)
Cool information…
Althoug just found in mid of 2009, It’s still good to be known.
Gracias
Simca (2 years ago)
Yeah i am agree with you. I think all those thing will dominate until 2010. Thanks for sharing this.
Nivlong (2 years ago)
Great blog post, Andy. I can see (guess at) inspired ideas from Wired magazine, maybe Ted.com, and a solid background in creating, consuming, and researching Web content.
Some minor typos, FYI:
* alt tags should be alt text (or attribute)
* more-or-less, instead of more-a-less?
On the design-side I found the following interesting as well: http://webtoolkit4.me/2009/08/15/inspiration-web-design-trends-in-2009-and-probably-2010
Philippe Bodart (2 years ago)
Nice post and good tips.Banner blindness is a huge problem and banner ads don’t attract engaged visitors.Thank you for the information.
Chris Pierre (2 years ago)
Great Post ,
In 2009 one of my favorite trends was jquery of course which I believe will be around for a long time.
P.S. The last statement about “IE decides to adhere to normal standards” – you almost got me that was funny lol.
Thanks ,
-CP
Marco Barbosa (2 years ago)
Outstanding!
Fantastic post!
Brian O'Connell (1 year ago)
Great article!
I’m a little concerned about the cloud computing trend in my client’s industry. I build websites for CPA and Accounting firms, and I have some issues with them hosting that much personal information and, software essential to a companies procedures on a third party server. But there’s no point in standing in front of a moving train. Consider this me standing on the side of the tracks with a caution flag. If you rely on a cloud service for essential processes be prepared with a couple of backup plans. If for some reason your provider goes out of business you’ll need to have all your data on-site and backup procedures available. Also, don’t just buzz through the TOS. Read them closely. If your business is going to be dependent on the service you might even want to show the TOS to a lawyer or you may one day hear the dreaded words, “I am altering the deal. Pray I don’t alter it any further.”
Serverroom (10 months ago)
Have heard nothing but great feedback from people using Silverlight streaming. Although I don’t know enough about it to recommend it myself, it seems to be one of the most promising video streaming services available today.
Hang khuyen mai (5 months ago)
Hands down, Apple’s app store wins by a mile. It’s a huge selection of all sorts of apps vs a rather sad selection of a handful for Zune. Microsoft has plans, especially in the realm of games, but I’m not sure I’d want to bet on the future if this aspect is important to you. The iPod is a much better choice in that case.