Demand for web development services has increased dramatically since the beginning of the century. The market for web development services in the United States alone is worth over $40 billion. It has grown about 6.5% annually over the last five years.
As the market continues to grow, new forces are taking hold. A variety of new trends are influencing the direction of the market, and development has become much more collaborative than it used to be. With the proliferation of open source projects and platforms like ConanCenter (where you can share and search for C/C++ Conan packages), creating and contributing is much more streamlined. But there are many other benefits as well.
Some of the most prominent trends for the past year are listed below. These trends will lead to big breakthroughs in web development. Here are five popular trends you can expect:
Modular design increases cost effectiveness and reduces development turnaround times
In the content marketing profession, one of the biggest strategies that experts emphasize is reusing and repurposing content. Marketers are encouraged to squeeze every ounce of value from every piece of content that they create. They might use the same content for blog posts, press releases, YouTube videos and SlideShare presentations.
The same general principle can be applied in the field of web development, except that intellectual property is tweaked and reused across different projects just as often as it is reused within them.
This has become a lot more popular in the past year, as more web developers focus on modular design. At first glance, modular design might seem like using templates to streamline the development process. However, it is quite a bit more advanced. Modules are intricately woven content blocks, which can be seamlessly merged with each other to quickly create sophisticated web development projects.
This can be beneficial in a number of ways, such as by helping with cybersecurity. This can reduce the risk of people needing to get anti-virus software.
Growing use of progressive web apps
Progressive web apps (PWAs) were developed in response to the growing number of people making purchases through mobile devices. Last year, 65% of all online purchases were made through a smartphone, tablet or other mobile device.
In the early days of mobile marketing, many retailers required customers to download special apps to make purchases. These apps were developed to provide a high-quality user experience, because their mobile websites simply didn’t cut it. However, many people felt that having to download an app was highly inconvenient. They had to take up more memory on their phone and risk getting infected with malware.
PWAs are the perfect compromise. They have the functionality of many apps, while also behave more like a website. Customers don’t have to download them, which is a lot more secure and convenient.
PWAs have been around since at least 2015, when the term was first coined by a German engineer that helped work on Google Chrome. Although they have been around for a few years, they have started gaining a lot more traction in 2020.
Single page applications
Single page applications are the natural evolution of responsive web development projects. They have started to become a lot more popular in recent months.
A single page application is a technique-controlled area of content that serves all of the needs of a user. It is designed to provide a seamless experience on any device. It is also developed with optimal memory efficiency in mind, so it is not necessary to continue reloading the application multiple times. This offers a new layer of convenience to customers.
Docker becomes more impregnated into modern with development solutions
Docker has provided a lot of flexibility and customization options to countless web developers. It has become even more popular in 2020, as developers face pressure to develop new apps to respond to the growing need for solutions to the COVID-19 pandemic. Docker has recently started pivoting from enterprise market to the grassroots developer market that it originally focused on. They renewed commitment to serving developers has led to some impressive breakthroughs, which has made Docker even more popular over the past few months. This is one of the reasons services like JFrog are so popular.
Artificial intelligence becomes more ingrained in every facet of the web development market
Artificial intelligence is vital to virtually all industries around the world. However, its benefits are presumably more evident in the web development profession than almost any other. Savvy web developers are finding new ways to utilize AI and machine learning to create websites more quickly and minimize the amount of bugs in the process. They are also finding ways to incorporate artificial intelligence technology in the features that they offer to end-users, such as with chatbots and cybersecurity interfaces.
