1. True Responsive Design
Businesses are only truly starting to realize the importance of being able to give their customers access to their site, no matter what device they are using, and are starting to demand mobile friendly design. However, true responsive design is more than just a 2 size solution, it also has to include responsiveness for tablets and varying sized mobile screens.
2. Custom Design and Development
The time for templates is over. A website is an extension of your brand, of your marketing, so you need to keep your website consistent with other efforts. Also, as businesses look more long-term (and see the web as such) they realize they need to be free from templates otherwise changes and unique improvements cannot be made (without incurring high cost and difficulty).
3. Open Content Management Systems
Also in relation to businesses starting to look at web as a long term investment, there has started to be a shift towards open CMS, which is widely used and accessible to other developers, while closed CMS' are unique to the developer who produced it (and usually are only used by themselves.) This means that firms who are unsatisfied by their current web developers, who use their own closed CMS, can't go to other developers to make changes and instead would have to completely rebuild their site, a costly and timely process, with someone else or be forced to stay with their current partners. Also, they do not allow for you to make changes to your site yourself, making things more complicated than they should be. Why would you want to be locked in like that?
4. Integrated Ecommerce
What if you could sell your products without having to go through distributors? What if all your backend processes could automatically update with every purchase? This is in fact very possible and we are seeing companies starting to automate their processes using web, an investment well worth considering the reduction of labour and increase in effeciency. The potential is huge and we will see companies this year start to unleash that potential.
