12 Web Development Trends to Watch

In web development, design and programming merge more and more as mobile, internet delivery, and data technologies advance. While keeping in mind the continual blurring of traditional technology lines (programming, design, hardware, PC, big data, etc.), here are some development trends to watch in the coming years.

1. Continued Development of Web-Based Programming - One of Info World's hot topics for the year, technological advancements have made it practical to create fully functional apps to be delivered via a web-browser. This reduces OS specific programming costs, and the marketing issues faced with various app marketplaces.
2. Big Enterprise Goes Open - "Just one day after Big Data firm Pivotal Software Inc. revamped its business model and open sourced core technologies," Microsoft Azure announced an open source integration to be used on Linux. Microsoft follows Google's Android which is leading the way. Today, watch for innovative ways open source technologies are going to be integrated with enterprise systems.
3. Data Management - With the last holiday season's queuing issues, data speed in web development is once again a significant issue.
4. Simplified Designs - With mobile development increasingly using websites over apps, web based applications need to be simple and easy to use. Modern trends are to use less color, less images and longer pages to produce aesthetically pleasing, minimalist designs.
5. Agile Development - According to TechRadar, a trend continuing to grow in 2015 is agile development processes. In the past, software development teams spent intense amounts of time building the foundations of their programs, then they worked on the functional aspects. With so much open source or cheap programming frameworks available, programming and design teams are using agile to cheaply and efficiently produce programs.
6. Smart Production Will Slow - With high-turnover technological products already integrated in the mobile-web driven world, new "smart" products will slow as they are worked into long-lived product cycles, according to Web Designer Depot.
7. Increasing Screen Diversity - As companies are releasing watches, glasses, and more wearable technology, interfaces are getting increasingly complex. Web development will increasingly use Responsive Design to optimize across multiple platforms.
8. Single Page Applications - To reduce screen problems, to manage data, and to simplify the user experience, single page web applications will become more common.
9. Data Processing on the Front End - Web applications have traditionally done most of their processing via servers. As more content is delivered via browser based programs, responsive programming languages take away the heavy lifting from the server and rely on each user's processing capabilities. This presents businesses the opportunity to develop large systems without extensive server presences.
10. Images are Big - When Grace and Lace appeared on ABC's Shark Tank, none of the sharks could believe a company could have pulled in as much money as they did off socks, with minimal advertising. Until the owner said her photograph was one of the most shared pictures on Pinterest. One well-done image can make a company, and with high definition screens the standard for mobile technology, expect high quality images to continue to be a part of web design and development.
11. Continued Use of Games - Many apps have been using the functionality, feel, and reward/consequence aspects of the gaming universe, even when creating serious commercial software. With online gaming itself becoming a huge industry, organizations will continue to use the feel of games to increase marketing of their web programs.
12. Cloud Infrastructure - The cloud is not just changing the way we access data, it is changing the way we think about information and business processes. Web design and development will include increasingly more powerful apps as high speed fiber connections, cloud hosting services, and colocation providers bring big data closer to consumers. These data processes will change the way businesses access data: employees anywhere, management everywhere, and systems available for any constituent.

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