Web Design & Development Predictions 2016 – Reviewed

Last but no means least it’s the web teams turn to recap on the predictions we made at the start of 2016 to see how our skills at predicting the future are. Here’s a hint, they’re not good enough to predict the lottery numbers.

Kean

At the start of the year I wrote that the web was going to start pushing back against flat design. It’s all still relatively flat and minimal but not quite at the scale it was, with more design elements such as gradients and shadows becoming more common again to create more visual contrast and most make interactive elements more obvious.

I also wrote that flexbox will become more unanimous on the web and we’ve certainly been working with this more at Bronco as we drop support for older versions of Internet Explorer and use autoprefixer to provide cover for the old and various vendor prefix implementations. SVG implementation is still pretty spotty even though the variety of implementations and ways we can style them seems to become more widely covered. A number of top brands are starting to utilise this image format but when you see that grainy GIF (hard G) image on the Barclays website you wonder why such a simple change can’t be prioritised when it will vastly improve the brand image.

Ben

Google has been shouting from the rooftops about optimising sites for mobile for well over two years now and more and more sites are taking the advice on board. They are also pushing the AMP platform for not just for publishing sites but also for e-commerce although some of the tools to do this such as form data are very much in their infancy, so whether we see the likes of Amazon or Ebay adopting ‘AMP’ is debateable. 2016 has seen a big rise in the number of sites going fully https once again in response to Google recommendations and I would expect this trend to continue into 2017 although with this will come more vulnerabilities and HTTPS security breaches as hackers focus their attention more on secure protocols. 2017 should also see the likes of BBC dropping Flash and fully supporting HTML5 for the delivery of their video content on the site. Currently only certain mobile devices make use of HTML5, with Flash being the default, meaning a lot of the content cannot be viewed on mobile devices.

Chris

Documentation still isn’t where I’d like it to be, but I think it’s steadily improving in general, with new players in the market wanting to make it as easy as possible for developers to start integrating their product.

More security breaches have occurred lately so big businesses have obviously not taken heed of previous warnings.

Live chat is commonplace, and this is a trend which will continue.