2019 – The State of Website Design
Now it is 2019 and web design is changing dramatically. It’s all about speed, and the technical savvy you possess. It’s certainly not about how much HTML and CSS you may know. Do you know about DNS pre-fetch? Do you know about the effect query strings have on page speed. How much faster is PHP 7.3???
Yes, there’s many more questions that are plaguing web designers who care enough to build the very best website development project they can.
2019 Website Development Tactics
2019 Communication Technology
Of course, that may be the downside. No worries— there’s an upside! Never at any other moment in history has it been easier to communicate with businesses, people and governments than today. The web has made it possible. Of course getting your message out in an appropriate manner is an altogether different matter.
Websites That Work
If your website is old and outdated, your business will suffer. If you aren’t marketing on Facebook and Google, your business is going to suffer. Is that the way it should be? That’s not for me to decide. It’s something people are talking about, and that conversation is going to get louder, however— That doesn’t change the facts that if you aren’t marketing on social media and running ads on popular search engines, then your business is likely not as busy providing goods and service as it can be. We all have to wear many hats, but luckily there are knowledgeable professionals that make it their business to know about what’s happening with website design, communication and the marketing involved throughout 2019 and beyond. Beach Web Design IT is such an entity. We make it our business to know and understand the technical ins-and-outs of website development, and the software and code platforms that exist which run the entire web, from the root server to the end-user. The digital marketing side is second nature, we’ve been on the web since 1994.
Speeding it up
Because there is such a focus on website speed and performance, designers and developers are trying to do more with less. A cleaner, simpler user interface is often the path to speed, so many designers opt for a bare-bones page style. We don’t believe that that’s always necessarily the correct route, but oftentimes it is. Things like sliders, animations and other interactive elements require more code, faster servers, more bandwidth, etc. So developers are striving to find the right balance between form, functionality and performance. It’s not an easy road, and is often filled with bumpy twists and turns. Throughout 2018 we learned a lot about how to best make a standard WordPress website perform as best as possible. All new builds on that CMS have those lessons built in.
Conclusion
Ask your developer/designer what they are doing about the changing standards for websites. Is your site several years old? Does your server still run PHP 5? Are your images optimized and still look great, but have reduced file sizes? Are you going to implement new image formats such as WebP? Does your server and/or website application have a caching system? If they return a blank stare, or even perhaps roll their eyes at you— It may be time to click here.
WordPress Bonus Tip
Ar you a WordPress developer with a mind to make your sites as fast as possible? You may be looking for an easy way to implement Webp on your WordPress-based website then. Webp Express for WordPress plugin allows many, many configuration options.
