New Web Development Trends for 2018

Trends impact the progress of a business. And it might be through website development or digital marketing campaign designed for a service or product. Web development practices trend faster before the actual time by which developers could implement them. So, if developers want to stay ahead in the competition then they have to learn web development trends that will be running TOMORROW and not the one that is running TODAY.

In few words, every web developer should be on the lookout for not the trends of today, but the trends of tomorrow. Below are listed few, which developers should keep an eye if they are developing a website or redesigning an old one.

Trend 1: Progressive Web App

Progressive web apps can be a powerful web development trend due to its ability to function without the internet connectivity.

The speed at which a website or an application load depends extensively on both internal and external factors. Since the progressive web apps are independent of the external factor, users will have a good experience using the service.

In PWA the information will be stored in a cache, due to which the data will load irrespective of the internet connectivity.

A typical definition of a progressive web app is as follows,

‘A Progressive Web App utilizes modern web capabilities to deliver an app-like user experience.’ – developers.google.com

Service workers here are essentially JavaScript files that are event-driven. The file runs separately from the main browser and interprets the message from the cache and delivers push messages.

Also, by using a website frequently users can create a shortcut on the homepage and easily access the application with a very less loading time.

As explained earlier, since the data is cached, users can have access to information irrespective of the network status and the new data gets updated once the app is online through service workers.

Trend 2: Single Page Application

Also referred as single page interface, SPA allows a website or a web application to fit on a single web page for providing better user experience.

No multi-level menu, complex navigation, or tons of content, but a simple long scrollable page for users to see. Single page application (SPA), is literally a trend of one-page website development.

When a web application constantly loads on (almost) every user-interaction, reloading everything from the server, it promises nothing but a bad experience for the users. Under single page application, this issue is addressed.

Once the page is loaded, no more HTML will be sent over the network and only data is requested from the server.

Trend 3: Customer Service Chatbots

Recently HDFC launched AI based chatbot ‘Eva’ (Electronic virtual assistant) and successfully addressed over 2.7 million customer queries while interacting with over 530,000 users in a period of six months.

Post the launch of the service chatbot, HDFC bank has registered a 160% month-on-month growth in transactions.
Since the Chatbot is built through the NLP (National Language Processing), the bank has been able to achieve over 89.6% accuracy in interpreting customer queries.

Chatbots are developed to understand and interact with customers anytime, any situation. So, it’s mandatory that web developers make chatbot a part of their websites, as a conversational interface for the customer service.

Trend 4: Push Notifications for Website

By the time you use various marketing mediums to direct and realize your customers of new products; it would have taken a good amount of time.

The new feature that is being discussed here is as similar to mobile app push notifications. The customers will visit a website and they will be offered an option to enable push notifications. Once the option is enabled, the customers will be notified of regular updates and new information enabling him to revisit the website for additional information.

Web developers should now that creating push notification feature for a website can optimize user-engagement and increase the in-coming traffic.

Trend 5: PHP 7.x – Laravel 5.x

Laravel 5.5 released in 2017 and is considered the most popular PHP website backend development framework.
With every new version, web developers are able to address complex issues in a much easier manner. With a built-in tool for command line Artisan, developers are finding it less burdening to perform repetitive programming tasks without having to work manually.

Another reason why web developers will find Laravel as one of the best PHP frameworks is the support for MVC architecture, where the clear definition of logic and presentation layer ensures better documentation and an improved performance.