So, it is May, and in the last 4 months, we have already seen a few trends establishing their authority on the web development realm. While some trends came into the fray, stayed for a while and made an exit before we could catch a blink, others are perched in firmly, and are likely to linger around.
These trends are what would dictate (or should dictate) how you create your website and plan out its marketing strategies. Staying adrift is important, and catering to these trends is the way to do so.
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Let’s take a look at some of the trends that have dominated the first quarter of 2014:
Responsive Design
Now, this is one challenge many businesses fall encounter on a consistent basis. While they realize how important it is to boil their website with some alluring designs and visual elements, what they fail to recognize is the fact that the features might be affecting their website’s responsiveness. Now, lack of responsive execution means that either the website takes too much time while loading on certain browsers and devices, or it loads in a half-baked manner – with pictures and slide shows not loading at all.
But come 2014, we have witnessed a growing importance being given to responsive designs. Website managers know that lack of responsiveness can be a major blow to their business interests. If their website fails on the responsiveness front, that means you are making your visitors for painfully longer durations of time. This is already a serious issue which needs to be addressed with urgency. And this is what we are seeing webmasters do this year. They are pulling every stop to ensure that their website loads fully and quickly, irrespective of the platform they are being accessed upon. And because their website is no longer giving loading issues to the visitors, the visitors are more then keen to stay on the site and navigate through the inner pages as well.
Quality Content Continues to Dictate the Terms
This comes hardly a surprise since Google prefers websites that boast of good quality content that is scattered throughout. If your website fails to address this and you keep posting plagiarized or low quality content, you aren’t likely to grab a lot of attention. The Internet users are always looking to read content that adds to their experience and adds some value to their time. When your content is plagiarized, Google is definitely going to punish you. Google comes down hard on the websites that copy paste content from other websites.
Also, if your content is just a spin from the content existing on a 1000 websites out there, you aren’t helping your cause either. Now, that content may not fit the definition of plagiarism, but when your readers don’t find anything new or fresh on your site to read, what is their motivation to stay and navigate the site further? What you also need to understand that the quality of the content goes beyond its originality. You must keep in mind that you have to make it interesting enough and use a kind of language that is comprehensible to your target audience. If you add too many jargons for an audience that’s isn’t very keen to read them, you are losing the plot.
The Single Page Websites are Increasing in Number
It is no secret that patience is not an attribute that the Internet audience can boast of. It sometimes can get lazy, real lazy. And this why they only check out the landing pages of websites without clicking on a category or any links on it. And the managers who run service websites, are making the most out of this. There are so many service websites that have started to display the entire information about their business and their services on the landing page only.
This way, the visitors get to read all about the company’s offerings by just rotating the mouse or scrolling down the page. The websites which have been using this feature are making sure that they make their sites feature-rich and filled with some beautiful pictures. This makes their site highly interactive and create an attention value that is sustainable.
Social Media for Marketing isn’t Headed South
Unarguably, social media has transformed the way website owners are targeting their potential readers. It has given them a greater wherewithal to pitch their website towards a larger set of audience. Social media comprises of a line of platforms like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn that prove to be exceptionally useful tools for gaining more leverage on the Internet and making more people know about the website. The traffic is boosted by a great extent as there is a huge section of your potential readers active on social media. When you post your site’s URL on these sites, preferably with hash tags, they are visible to a large set of audience from your friend lists and also to those who are accessing the hashtags that make way for the Facebook and Twitter trends.
But, one platform that you cannot ignore at any cost is Google Plus. A number of website managers and beginners in digital marketing have been ignoring the importance of Google +. this platform, for the fact that is powered by Google, is a very important platform. Not only are you able to garner additional traffic for your website. But you also get to create a more search friendly value for your website. Google indexes your page with a greater degree of assurance. And this means you can enjoy more organic traffic on your site and create a better value. The organic traffic is a real booster as the studies of analytics have revealed that the bounce rate of websites that receive heavy amount of traffic from search engines have low bounce rates as more relevant audience accesses their websites. It also boosts the avg. time spent on each page.
More Attention to the Fonts Used on the Pages
2014 is also emerging as an year where companies and website owners are realizing their keeping customized fonts is proving to be a very important factor. Many websites are using larger fonts in their post to make them more visible and draw more focus on the headlines or the more important points that they want to pitch their readers to.
And there is one more contributing reason to it actually. The fact that more and more people are accessing websites from their mobile devices has provided to be a major factor in making the website owners use larger and clearer fonts on their site’s pages.
When it Comes to Content Marketing, Guest Posting Will Won’t Go Out of Fashion
Whilst its true that Google’s updates have proved to be major dents for websites that have done too much of a guest posting, but it doesn’t mean that you have to get rid of this practice altogether. Guest posting is still an amazingly useful practice to build back-links in order to get a good page rank for your website. The higher is the page rank of the site, greater is its reputation over the web. Since your website’s page rank is good, you also get many requests by authors wanting to write a guest post on your site. What this does is that increases the content on your site which further boosts the incoming traffic. You only need to take care that you don’t put your website’s links on a site that has very low Alexa and zero PR. If you are making sure that you don’t guest post beyond the permissible levels, Google isn’t going to penalize you.
Internet will keep evolving and tossing at us newfangled trends every now and then. On our end, we have to stay adrift and create certain trends and opportunities of our own.
About the Author
Maria Mincey is blogger who loves technologies and digital marketing. She currently works as a chief writer of Offshore PHP Development Company – Xicom Technologies Ltd. and she has a quantum experience to share. |