How To Respond To Responsive Design:
The New Reality of the Mobile Web

By Adam Hostetter

Lists are everywhere—Top Cities to Live In; Wealthiest People, Coldest Places on Earth. All fun to read, but here’s one you can actually do something with, however, starting now!

Website design and development is a moving target where little changes here and there, year-to-year can make a big difference. In the past few years, you’ve heard a lot about responsive or mobile websites, and the use of videos and graphics to make the content more easily digestible for your users. A lot of that still holds true. Adding to that are a few new trends to watch out for in 2014.

1. Get social. There was a time when one of the rules for a high-ranking website was to have many others linked to it. It takes some attention to detail to notice the subtle change Google made to its ranking details in May 2013 on its webmaster tools website that raises the stakes a little. Notice the text changed from “In general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by increasing the number of high-quality sites “that link to their pages” to “that users will want to use and share.” So it’s no longer enough to simply link to other websites, but add original content that will be perceived as valuable by your users. If it’s trending on, for example, Twitter or Google+, it’s going to trend on search result pages as well. So, encourage your users to share and make it easy for them to do so by integrating social media icons and RSS feeds into your website content.
2. Big data schmeta! You’ve heard the phrase. Here’s the secret: it’s a marketing hype. Big data is any dataset that can’t fit onto a single, local hard drive. Guess how big a single hard drive is nowadays? Four terabytes. That’s huge. To give you an idea, four terabytes is enough to store all the New York Times’, pollsters’, and news organizations’ 2012 election data.
   
   What used to be big data a few years ago, no longer holds the same meaning as today’s big data. Why? It’s simply because that same data can now be stored on a single hard drive with the storage capacity that hadn’t existed then. What’s big data now won’t be so in 2024 when hard drive manufactures start churning out, quite conceivably, 100 terabyte drives! Unless you’re Google or Facebook, you don’t need to worry about big data on your website. Rather, you should focus on how you use your data and how well it’s maintained.
3. Good content. Remember Get social above? You need evolving content that users find interesting and will want to share. Anyone can build you a fantastic looking and functioning website, but the content must come from within your association. What does Google care more about? A pretty face or easily gobbled-up by their search crawler letters, words, and sentences? It’s no wonder Wikipedia comes up so often in results. Provide good content and almost everything else that has to do with running a successful website will come more easily to your association.
4. Siri & Google now. Perhaps the most shocking 2014 trend is how users will derive more information from your website without ever having to visit it. What’s hemoglobin? When is the NYSAE Annual Meeting? The weather in Topeka? All of these can be answered by digital assistants found in smartphones, like Apple’s Siri or Google Now, without users ever having to visit a website.
   
   In a strange twist, the fact that a digital assistant can cull this information from your website is perhaps the highest compliment you could receive for your well done, properly search engine optimized website.
5. Flat design. In 2014, look for website design to trend toward simple shapes, colors, and typography. We’re going back to the basics. Web agencies tend to toot their own horns and showcase shining design examples that in many cases are not to the client’s benefit. A website that emphasizes clarity and usability over pomp and snazz will ultimately serve its constituency better. Google also notices and rewards those sites with high page rankings.

To recap:

Get social adapted from thoughts of Jai Rawat, CEO of ShopSocially.com.

Big Data Schmeta! adapted from thoughts of Dave Fowler, Founder of Chartio.

Adam Hostetter leads American Technology Services' Design & Development group. A recent presenter at NYSAE’s Technology SIG, where he addressed Making Your Website More Mobile Friendly, he will also be speaking at NYSAE’s Technology Institute in April 2014. He can be reached through his website at networkats.com or by email at ahostetter@networkats.com.