So what is the future for the internet?
I have spoken to a few customers recently who have felt that their websites should be visually stunning, with widgets and complex functionality that allows people to drag and drop images etc. Their idea was to create an impressive website which stands out from the rest, wowing people into ordering their product and passing on links to their website. One client told me that “flash was the future of the internet”
Whilst it is true to say that there are more possibilities when designing for the web now than there were at the beginning, I do not think that flashy video game type websites will be the future of the web. Certainly not our immediate future.
The web is currently littered with millions and millions of website, some of them decades old and some written more recently. Regardless of age, some are well designed and coded and others will not perform well at all. Finding and accessing these websites can be difficult to say the least. Ultimately the users experience of a website is dictated by their computer, internet connection and their browser. There are lots of variations of these and over the years those invested in the internet have made effort to ensure that there are some standards to which we should conform.
Designing and coding websites is not formally regulated in any way. We don’t have inspectors behind our desks telling us that a certain method of coding will cause issues for some users. And those buying websites from companies like ours, are often unaware of the code behind the screens and how it should be created. Some might even believe that we simply use products like Word to create websites at the push of a button. Well fortunetly this is not the case (and I say fortunately because this means that there is still a lot of skill involved in creating great websites – and whilst this remains true we have jobs!). There are a lot of rules and guidelines which dictate best practices in website design. There are now legal regulations about how websites should contain certain data for certain groups. And there are new laws about how websites should be accessible – that is – usable to people with all different abilities.
Whilst the web is struggling to establish itself as a useful resource to all, guidelines are changing at a quick pace. It is often a full time job as a developer to keep up with the rules and standards.
And it is for this reason that I firmly believe that before the web evolves into a video game type environment, it will first become a reliable platform.
All those websites that are not conforming to guidelines will eventually fail to work in our browsers and some functionality that we have available to us now (like fixing font sizes) might be removed from browsers and search engines might adjust their database to ignore *bad* websites. Certainly the drive to be on the top spot on Google has website developers thinking harder now than in previous years about conforming to regulations. That temptation to load a website and claim that it *looks* ok is no longer good enough. Websites have to work, drive traffic and generate leads. The next phase for the internet is going to be one of streamlining, good coding techniques, affordability and accessibility.
My vision of the internet is not a plain boring internet, where all websites look the same, but one where information is priority and all websites are easy to use and find.
Once we have the basics correct, I believe that widgets and extra interactive functionality could play a huge part of the web. For information based websites these interactive tools would be a good marketing technique and for the kids (“the kids” gosh I sound old!) a whole new farm of websites will appear which are purely fun based. For Joe Bloggs running his window cleaning business, information and accessibility will be the single driving force.
Websites designed right now need to work for search engines, work for browsers and share their important data with their audience.
What do you think? I would love to hear from you.
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