Check me out, in the bow-tie above…. What an absolute stud!!! But anyways…back to business, here are some basic web trends you will be seeing in 2010.
Design:
There are actually quite a few design trends that you will see more of this year. Oversized headers and footers are slowly becoming more widely used. Also, typography has become a huge part of design. We are seeing many designers focus on using larger fonts to attract users, rather than the plain system fonts or images. Though we don’t see a lot of them today, hand drawn or sketch style websites seem to be popping up here and there, and may have a big web presence in the near future.
Mobile:
One of the biggest development trends for 2010 will be mobile sites. If you are a business and don’t have a mobile site, get one! With thousands of Blackberries, IPhones, Droids, and other smart phones sold daily, people want mobile sites. I often spend countless hours on my Blackberry scrolling to get to content on a page, because the site I’m using is made for a non mobile platform. Get a mobile site! It is becoming a necessity.
Search Engine Optimization:
With Google and other search engines no longer using keywords in their page ranking what does one use to get their website ranked higher? There are a number of factors that play a role in rankings now. Custom page URLS, meta descriptions, page titles, and relevant content are key components in getting your website ranked high. Another “must” is having a XML sitemap created and added to your “Google Webmaster Tools” account. This allows you to notify Google that you have a sitemap, and want them to list it in their search results.
Social Media:
If you haven’t heard of Twitter or Facebook you probably aren’t reading this article, so I will continue on. Having social media accounts not only drive users to your site, but allows them to get to know you. You can post special deals, updates, or any other information to your followers. You can also easily have your social media feed display right on your site. Search engines like Google now crawl social media posts and display them in their search results as soon as you publish them, it’s pretty cool. If you have a social media account and want to customize the look and feel, or don’t have one but would like help setting one up, give us a call.
Well until my next post… mahalo!
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Tags: custom URLs, facebook, Google Webmaster Tools, meta descriptions, mobile websites, search engine optimization, SEO, smart phones, social media, twitter, web design, web trends, XML sitemap
Ditto re: typography and sitemaps. The biggest new trend right now is increased use of custom font stacks and font embedding services (such as Typekit) that use CSS3’s @font-face selector. Also, when I created and uploaded an XML sitemap for my site, I noticed a big jump in crawls and uniques.