The future is now! Sort of. And its also the second after you read this statement. And the second after that one.
Ultimately, the world around us is constantly moving forward and it is the job of any expert in any industry to be paying attention for how we can be better prepared for what comes next. This is true for scientists and researchers, and its true for Coalition Technologies in Los Angeles.
As experts in the field of web design, the online marketplace, and search engine optimization, we have to be certain that our team, and our clients are prepared for the future. So what do we see coming? What changes will a website for a Los Angeles business reflect five years from now? How will our search behavior change? What will the Google algorithm of five years look like? Will there be a Google in five years? These are all questions we ask ourselves and make sure we can find some semblance of an answer that isn’t solely imagination run wild.
The first thing we know is that there is a divergence occurring within the end hardware that most people browse the internet with. Static ‘desktop’ type monitors are getting bigger and bigger, with better image resolution and color available for end users. The introduction of the television as a web browser no doubt will increase this scaling a hundred fold. At the same time, a vast and growing population of users also look at websites from mobile devices- cell phones, tablets, and e-readers too, are increasing in percent of internet use month over month, and this trend won’t stop.
So knowing that there is this divergence occurring, what might a website of today need to be prepared for? We see a couple key elements for our clients and how they need to be ready for the evolution of the internet:
- Sites need to be screen size respondent. Big monitors need more information and more content and better image quality. Small size screens need a more simplified feature set and more compression of content. This divergence essentially means that each website needs to be coded to have two sets of instructions- one for the large screen, high resolution set, and one for the small screen, lower resolution set. In five years, we believe there will be more interactivity between the two. The television set will become solely a monitor type functionality and will adapt much the same technology as a desktop computer. We also foresee the mobile devices becoming the remote control and keyboard of those large monitors as applications enable more control.
- Mobile Applications will be increasingly important pieces of functionality for large corporations, small business marketing, and the internet experience. Site functionality and marketing efforts should seek to effectively integrate with application processing.
- We are reinventing the wheel. Many of the features of mobile phones and devices already exist on desktop. We’re simply making things smaller, more streamlined, and more simplistic. This equates to wider adaption, and wide usage. Your website needs to be designed with this in mind. More focused, more intuitive, and less unnecessary burdens (RSS feeds, irrelevant graphics or pages, etc).
- The web will be integrating with you, in more ways then you thought possible. Websites will be finding a way into almost every room of the house, into almost every car, and into every business. In 5 years, I think we can expect to see nearly 100% penetration of the internet into any part of a developed countries society.
