It’s January and that means one thing: CES 2014. That in turn means yet another show filled with exciting new technologies that will promise to change our lives and turn the world on its head, and it means a whole array of new technology stories and news.
These make interesting reading for anyone interested in technology or the web, but they are absolutely critical reading if you happen to run a website. That’s because every new direction that technology takes will influence the ways that people start accessing your site, and this in turn will mean you need to alter your design to cater to that.
So knowing what’s around the corner, how will your site need to adapt in order to be ready for the next big paradigm shifts? Read on to find out which features you should add to your site now if you want to be ready for the incoming waves of new technology.
A Mobile Site
A mobile site is something you should definitely already have – or you should have an adaptive site design that can become a mobile friendly layout when it’s called upon to do so.
This is going to get more important than ever though going ahead, because we’re likely to see an even broader range of different devices used for viewing websites. Smart watches are big this year at CES for instance, as is wearable technology in general, and while these items are designed mainly for receiving notifications it’s only a matter of time before people start actively surfing the web on them. If your site doesn’t look good on an iPhone screen then how do you expect it’s going to look on an iWatch?
Buttons, Infinite Scroll and Swipe
Great mobile web design isn’t just about ensuring your site can fit onto a tiny screen though, it’s also about avoiding scenarios in which people have to try and click on tiny little links that they have to squint in order to be able to see. At the same time it’s also important to think about when and how ‘touchless’ computing is going to catch on. The Leap Motion is showing off new firmware at CES 2014 (and coming built-in to lots of HP keyboards), while the new Kinect has huge potential for a range of gestures and movements. In the future then people might browse your site without touching it at all, which makes it even more important for you to add things like large buttons that remove the need for locating and clicking text with a fingernail.
Thus having large buttons is a good idea, but better yet is to use a design that does away largely with the need for clicking links at all. This might mean a site that uses infinite scroll for instance so that the only navigation requires is to scroll down, or it might mean registering swipes in order to move forward and backward through pages of your site as though it were a book.
Super High Res Images
It took a while, but these days almost every device is HD (even Nintendo got on the band wagon this time). Just as that’s happened though, HD is old news and we’re starting to see 4K televisions and tablets. What’s more, we’re also starting to see 4K televisions with the capabilities of tablets – those are huge and super-high-resolution screens that people will be navigating your site on. Thus if you want to ensure your images still look good they’re going to need to be very high definition.
That also provides another argument for creating a separate mobile site: are you really going to be able to create a single adaptive design that can display on a smartwatch or a Kindle Screen and on a 4K smart TV?
Rich Snippets and Meta Tags
Meta Tags are dead according to SEOs and many web design companies and have been replaced by rich snippets which provide search engines like Google with the information they need to display when showing your site on their listings. Certainly rich snippets and probably meta tags though are going to start playing a slightly different role though with the emergence of Google Glass and similar technologies. Apple, Google and Microsoft are all putting effort into services that can provide smart answers and references in response to the spoken word, so if you want your site to be brought up as a suggestion when someone talks to their Google Glass, you need to ensure Google can easily find out what it’s about.
