The internet landscape is changing incredibly fast. A decade ago, having a website would mean that you have a business card online. A website also means that your business – whatever it is – is high tech and thus was a form of status quo when place on your business card. But the internet has moved on. New technologies have been developed. Broadband and wireless internet has become faster than ever. The world is changing. Websites are changing as well. Here are the technologies and trends that will affect websites this 2012.
Go Mobile. Websites that fail to incorporate mobile technology will be playing second fiddle in their own niches. More and more users are using their smart phones or mobile phones to surf online. The Christmas of 2011 saw 3.7 million Android activations alone! If you consider iPhone’s iOS that’s 6.8 million devices activated! That’s quite a record for one day considering that there are 700,000 Android activations per day. These figures are absolutely fascinating to the internet marketer. And if you are marketing your website properly, you would do it a favor if you customize your website to suit mobile devices.
And then there are the mobile apps. There were 242 million apps downloaded that same day were 6.8 million phone devices were activated. That’s an incredible statistic to ignore. But some would ask, could this be the end of websites? Although a valid question, the answer is a resounding no. Mobile phones are the new PCs. When PCs were new to the market, applications were king. Now it’s having an online connection so that users can surf the web which is primarily made up of interconnected websites. The year 2012 will bring more apps – especially apps that will be geared towards businesses. And these apps will need a home in the form of websites for support and sales. Some apps will be using the backend of existing websites too. So this means that apps is positioned to be a tool that will either supplement or complement a business’ existing website.
Social media network. Social media is the website evolution that is taking the online community by storm. Starting with MySpace then Facebook and now Google+, social media is the current trend in website development. And this will continue on in the year 2012. Existing business websites will have to incorporate existing social media to their own website and some will create their own social media network. As more and more users go online and spend their time online, having some form of social interaction will be the trend for some websites. Gone are the days were a static, boring, non-intereactive website is the norm. Now it’s mobile and social media. Most social media network allows the creation of a web page for a business’ product or services but this does not necessarily mean that they will replace websites. Business’ will have to exercise due diligence that social media networks come and go. Just take a look at MySpace and Friendster.
WordPress 2012 will conquer websites. It’s a no brainer. With the current trend, WordPress will be growing even much faster in 2012 especially when ICANN starts the process of approving more gTLDs. This means that anyone can develop their own domain name extension i.e. .paris, .car, .sport, etc. And when ICANN starts approving this, more websites will be going online.
Online advertising will see an explosion of growth in 2012. Google’s main source of income is advertising so it is no surprising that as WordPress becomes the tool of choice when it comes to website development, it rolled out its own advertising platform. This means that if you have a blog at WordPress.com, you can put out ads on your blog similar to Google’s AdSense.
TV and the internet. This has been on the table for quite a time. But a decade ago, the speed of the internet cannot keep up with the pace of software development. So although there were software that can broadcast video way back then, the speed became the limiting factor that turned off users. And that is changing now. Internet speeds have increased as communications structure has changed with the use of fibre optic cable and wireless broadband. New algorithms to transmit data over the internet have also been developed. It’s possible that we may see some TV shows being syndicated this 2012 – or a protoype of it. YouTube will be a great platform for this prototype as it already has the structure to do so.
The year 2012 is definitely great for websites and website development. It will also be a good year for WordPress. And that’s why htmlpress.net will continue to respond to these trends to help you build better websites this 2012.
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