Web Development trends

[tamil1996]

I have planned to revamp my website. Can you share me the web development trends that will influence in 2019?

[level1]

My suggestion is to ignore 99% of the ‘trends’ that make modern websites bloated, slow, complicated and impossible to navigate, and instead make it as minimal and easy-to-use as possible. I’m pretty sure that’s not a ‘trend’ but it is something your visitors will appreciate.

[cored]

I recommend you check out Behance to get an idea of the trends moving into 2019, along with some past trends.

A few of the galleries I’ve found most use out of from Behance:

• Best of Web 2018 UI Design by Berkay Erdinç.
• 2019 Design Trends Guide by Loredana Papp-Dinea, Mihai Baldean and Milo Themes.
• Design Trends 2019 by Nicola Lops, Camilla Maccaferri, Massimiliano Albizzati, Duminda Perera, Megrianne Vallejo and Secil Kaya.
• 2017 Design Trends Guide by Loredana Papp-Dinea, Mihai Baldean and Milo Themes.

Or if you prefer “real world” examples of websites, check out Awwwards.

Good luck with the revamp!

[Thunderlane]

The links above are probably what you need but a word of caution, some people take them way too literally. Sometimes a minimalistic design with few key elements that make it memorable is more than enough combined with usability. Quick example - mobile menu, for example, is not as usable as some of the alternatives on desktop, yet we’re seeing a trend of some websites ditching the traditional menu elements in favor of mobile one only.

What I mean is that I’ve seen many designers so inspired by trends and awards and Behance that they present designs that they come up with designs that are barely usable for the website in questions. For example apple like design for a company that sells thousands of products, including industrial vibrators. Yes it’s nice to have big product pages when you have a dozen of products, but it’s hard to maintain it consistently when you have thousands and less than a trillion dollars to spend on stuff.

So basically what I’m trying to convey as information here is - check the trends in UI, colors, typography, sure, make sure you use the right technologies for the amount of visitors you’re expecting, account for growth etc, but dig a little bit and research sites similar to yours. Chance is your visitors frequent them also and it’s good to have a distinct and unique design without breaking the force of habit of both the ones who’ll maintain the website and those who will visit it. And don’t forget about your current visitors also :).

Personal two cents.

[Argon]

Intro

I have a feeling this could get into quite a heated debate I’m gonna give my two cents from a more coding perspective, more of an ‘engineering’ perspective… Only rule that applies to all is KISS, just keep it simple, make sure it works and the rest is just for fun…

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Client Side Tech

I recommend learning how to use tools such as webpack, and master ES6 & above, purely because it’s just easier… Cleaner… Concise, I say f**k anyone using IE-whatever…

Jokes, but more seriously, at most, I’d say do a check to see what browser they’re using, if it’s old enough, then lazy load in some polyfiller(s)… But I’m far beyond trying to support legacy browsers… Not that long ago, I was still supporting IE5… In 2018… cold shiver… I mean ES6^ is the future to be fair… Maybe look into writing functional style JavaScript, personally I love it…

Once you have an understanding of native/vanilla JavaScript, you can then go on and learn whatever is 'down with the kids'. Once you know the underlying technology, the rest is pretty damn easy…

Although in my experience, employers would beg to differ because y’know, a framework that uses a language that you’re a pro with, clearly you’d have no clue what you’re doing…

Like @level1 said, ignore 99% of the so called trends, they’re actually awful for a lot of scenarios, or even just trying to make an efficient website… I mean I’ve made an entire website, once all content is downloaded (including images) it’s the size of just downloading a minified copy of Angular… Like c’mon… You can easily build state machines and SPA’s and all that jazz without any additional bloat…

Take Redux as an example, a 'senior developer' I know who’s a fan boy of React(probably because of JSX), he didn’t believe me how inefficient tech like Redux is until he wrote something himself and then saw that due to the complex nature of the specific application, Redux was causing lag just for typing on an input field… Like dude… Just why? … That was his own code, he wrote that, but he finally got my point…

I mean for work, sure, learn one framework at most, because in industry companies are like Oh sh**, they're using that technology, WE NEED TO USE THAT!! I have no clue what I'm talking about, but we fu**ing need it!… It’ gets very old very quickly in my personal opinion… And there’s always some kid(s) developing new frameworks that are shinier and prettier than the last, probably new frameworks being produced every week at this rate…

If you wanna be building some funky web applications, you could look into technologies such as web assembly, look into workers(multi threading) and just master asynchronous stuffs…

In a nutshell, I’d say do a lot of stuff like some Google engineers present, the initial page load is like <15KB, then do magic stuff after the initial load…

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Server Side Tech

Language wise, best advice I can give is to learn whatever is dominant in your area(s), in my area it’s C#, although it’s funny because my current role is a JavaScript & Java role… I mean the theory/logic is transferable from one language and framework to another, I wouldn’t say that it’s mind blowingly different for the basics…

When it comes to performance, that’s an interesting one… General rule of thumb, right tool for the job, if you feel like you need to be using 'x' number of languages all on the same server, then so be it I say… But in my experience I’ve worked with 3 languages running on a single development environment at any given time…

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Functional JavaScript

Just to get my point across, I’ll give you an example… Personally I love how concise this code is… So without further adieu, here’s the code, okay it may not be the best or most efficient solution ever, in fact I know damn well it isn’t, but it’s small, clean and above all else, simple…

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Conclusion

Just master the native technologies, then learn the 'trendy' stuff like SASS is to CSS, but for the love of God, don’t be that guy that tries to learn all the modern toys all the time… Maybe focus on one or too if you have to, back end, a framework of some sort is near compulsory, even small companies use them… Maybe start with something easy if you’re new as hell, i.e. Laravel, then work your way to whatever you want…

With regards to a lot of these tools, they’re only really worth using if you’re working for an enterprise scale company, which makes sense… But small-mid level, often it’s just unnecessary…

I can imagine that my personal opinion is very much like marmite, you either love it, or hate it… I mean I’ve had people get so angry about my input you could swear they’d wanna stab me!

Again… All of the above, it’s just my opinion… Take it or leave it…

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Update - 01/04/2020

So, I guess that it should also be worth mentioning other tech too, in addition to everything that I’ve previously mentioned, some tech that may go somewhat beyond the scope of just writing code, an example being Kubernetes, it’s a pretty awesome tool.

Cloud Tech

Obviously cloud-native is typically the way to go these days, there’s many reasons for it, typically due to the fact that it can save organisations money, reduce risk, increase stability, etc. But there are a few cloud native technologies that I really suggest you look at since they’re somewhat vendor agnostic, meaning that you’re not strictly limiting your knowledge to a specific cloud provider:

• Docker
• Kubernetes
• Microservice Architecture or SOA if you prefer
• DevOps
• etc.

A big part of this suggestion massively depends on what you plan to do, if you want to work for a large, international enterprise scale entity, then you should really hammer each one of these topics if I’m being honest, especially if you’d like to progress to a solutions architect role or something like that. However, if you just wanna work for a small startup, maybe just play around with Docker, I find it’s just beautiful, you can get up & running with Docker & any tech stack super easily.

Take it from experience, I started in small-ish startups, but due to salary, I now work for a reasonably large financial institution, salary aside, in my honest opinion such an approach can be better than sticking to one or the other. Having faced completely different sets of problems, in completely different companies, it’s really made me think outside the box when tackling problems, obviously if there’s an industry standard for a specific problem, why reinvent the wheel? Keep it simple & all that jazz.

[tamil1996]

Thanks for sharing the informative post.

[yeless]

I think that AMP pages are a really good trend. Look at this example of site loading:

[ChrisA]

I think it very much depends on the purpose of the website, typical user, etc. Mobile friendly seems to be the highest importance and I’m no expert, but I think the big G prefers that from an SEO point of view.

[tkoham]

ghost is ok if you need publishing and collab features but don’t want to deal with wp

not really a trend but it may help

[thro]

Like this. Sadly not updated in years

http://www.ntk.net/

[anon85095355]

That is some top-notch mobile-friendly front-end web-development right there.

[level1]

Personally, I wouldn’t go with fixed column widths or try to recreate a ‘retro’ feel. Simple navigation, a focus on content, elimination of bloated and pointless graphics, and a streamlined and responsive layout that lets basic HTML elements do the heavy lifting like they are supposed to.

[Carterclarke]

Some times some tools may affect your website and it won’t developed your site.