As the New Year arrives to spread its magic around, it’s time to look forward to embracing the latest trends showing tremendous opportunities in the web milieu. As a web developer, you might be facing challenges to meet the evolving needs of users like – UI/UX, loading time, performance, scalability, cross-platform accessibility & security to name a few. It is vital to pay heed to the anticipated changes in the Web Development Ecosystem.

In this blog, we have jotted down the most credible predictions & promising trends in Web Development that will rule in 2018.

1. Artificial Intelligence

   AI is everywhere from gaming to education, hospitality to healthcare. It’s dramatically changing the IT landscape and companies are competing with each other to build up a team of experts of the industry to provide ground-breaking solutions that automate everything. In context to the web, it has already gained the momentum by realizing its potential use cases like filtering a different kind of abusive content, recognizing emotions and creating websites through an AI-enabled assistant in no time.

According to a recent study by Merrill Lynch the Artificial Intelligence market will reach around $153 billion in future.

2. Progressive Web Applications   

   You might have heard about Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) in 2015, they’ve come out with a bang this year, becoming a major rival of native mobile apps. Though similar in Functionality & Features to native mobile apps, PWAs are truly web pages or websites enfolding a host of features on web browsers. There are numerous advantages to using PWAs such as the ability to work offline, instant loading, reliability, ability to receive push notifications and extraordinary UX. More importantly, such websites can be built in less time and are easier to deploy and maintain.

A study on mobile usage revealed that mobile apps account for 89% of total mobile media time –Smart Insights. Utilizing a similar format for mobile apps would possibly work better with the target audience.

3. Chatbots on the Cusp

   With chatbots gaining traction in early 2016 & 2017, the Quality of chatbots will now be the next web development trend to fortify engagement & conversion rates. Whether your business is selling medicines, electronic toys or even software development services, a chatbot is a must-have for your website. Right from answering frequently asked questions to guide customers via text or auditory methods to complete a transaction­, having a chatbot function with 24/7 availability equals impeccable support.

Gartner Predicts that 85% of all customer interactions will proceed without human interference by 2020.

4. The Web of Things

   A web-connected world of smart things that can create, store, share data and can be programmed to make decisions will be a great feat for the web developers in the coming years. Coupled with the two complementary technologies, Near Field Communication (NFC) for two-way data communication and ultra-low power chips for the tidy environment, the web of things can turn everything we interact with into computable entities. As this trend is becoming more pervasive, the roles and responsibilities of web developers must evolve to keep up the pace with which it is expanding into a gargantuan list of appliances and devices that require a web interface.

5. Yarn Package Manager:

   Indubitably, package managers are so popular amongst developers as they allow them to install, update, configure and uninstall code modules within their applications. There are two most commonly used Javascript package managers like NPS and Bower. However, recently a new package manager was introduced by Facebook in association with Exponent, Google, and Yard comes into the picture to overcome the issues associated with NPM, especially in performance, security, and consistency. For e.g. NPM creates two different versions of a particular module in the local development environment. Yarn with lock file feature to tie modules to a specific version of a project help developer to install the same version in all development environments.

6. Rails5:

   Though released in 2016, Rails 5 is still young and will be gaining popularity in the years to come. The evolution with some interesting additions like Turbolinks 5 and Action Cable are inciting excitements amongst the developers. Turbolinks 5 is quite useful to create Single Page like Applications from Rails stack, allowing links to fetch full HTML pages without using client-side JavaScript frameworks. While ActionaCable introduces a new way to use WebHooks in Rails to build real-time applications. This simplifies the process of creating notifications and chat features with no compromise to ActiveRecord resources. In addition to this, Rails 5 merged with popular rails_api into its codebase, which further helps developers to create API only applications in Rails and hook them up to their preferred JavaScript or native frameworks.

7. Static Site Generators

   Static websites created through generators like Jekyll will enable developers to increase security, loading time, and ease of deployment, which somewhere lacks in dynamic websites with extended functionality. These generators won’t need a database to create websites. All it needs is the text stored in files. As Content Delivery Networks CDNs and APIs become an integral part of the web, developers believe that static site generators might be an interesting trend to thrive in the years to come. However, static websites have no real-time content/user content, which has become breathe of the web today.

8. Virtual Reality

   When discussing the futuristic trends, Virtual Reality holds the distinction because of its unique way of providing the amazing user experience. After disrupting the gaming industry by Oculus Rift & Vive, it’s transitioning to the web as tech behemoths (Google & Mozilla) started working on APIs to immerse users in the virtual world. Well, this year bring us apps based on virtual reality like real estate virtual tours, it’s all set that innovation in the web will take a new turn and would become a strong competitive advantage for companies.

9. Motion UI

   Web developers have always been concerned about the user interface of the website. This is just because of the fact that sometimes the best-looking designs fail in terms of functionality – or in providing the information users are looking for. Originally designed for mobile apps to use animations and transitions effect to alert users to actions/ important components, this technology offers a high degree of customization which further enables developers with many options to add style and life to a project. For example – page header transitions, animated charts, background animations, modular scrolling, parallax, overlay, cloning, offset delay, etc.

10. PHP 7.x – Laravel 5.x

    When we talk about the PHP Framework fraternity, Laravel stands out as a clear winner. It comprises Object Oriented Libraries and other existing packages that make the development of web apps faster, easier and more secure. Another popular reason of its popularity amongst the web developers is that it supports MVC Architecture like Symfony, which streamlines things between logic and presentation. Released in July 2017 and supported by large open source developer community, Laravel 5.5 is backed by regular updates to ensure that the framework caters to the changing needs of the website owners.

Wrapping it up:

Never forget that a website is a virtual handshake between you and your clients. Being ahead in the race of Web Development means getting armed with all the latest trends to build a website that engages visitors, satisfies existing customers, encourages past customers to come back.  2018 is all about being audacious, ‘out there’ and focusing on simplicity. Whatever it is you are thinking of –

• Building a New Website
• Revamping / Strengthening an existing Website
• Professional Back-end Maintenance of your e-commerce Portal(s)
• Virtual Reality based Web Apps

KritiKal’s deft Web Development Experts will get it done. At KritiKal Solutions, our Team follows the best development practices combined with latest trends to deliver the best web applications to help you always stay ahead of the Competition.