You don’t have to be a prophet to foresee what’s coming up in 2009 and beyond. Why? Most of the future web trends are already unfolding. For others the foundations are laid by hardware, web infrastructure and the broader economy.
This is a collection of 30 web trends for 2009 in the realms of
- web design
- search and SEO
- social media and blogging
- marketing
- software.
Web Design
Obsessing about forms
While for years we have seen galleries and top lists showing off homepages, lately there is a trend of best of comment form or search form design. We’ll see more of it 2009. I predict whole websites only dealing with forms. Usability and marketing experts and even books like Web Design for ROI have stressed the importance of proper form design.
Internet Explorer 6 support
With the market share of IE6 finally below 20% more sites will stop supporting it which will result in even more people switching due to experiencing problems with it. This will make way for overdue developments in website design which were previously unsupported.
Light weight websites
Light weight small website designs will return. With the huge success of netbooks and smartphones websites will become smaller again both in pixel and byte size as not everybody will want to create several versions for each viewer, even with different stylesheets.
Search and SEO
Mobile search
Location based mobile search on smartphones like iPhone, BlackBerry Storm, Sony XPERIA, HTC HD but also more Google phones to come will change business. The proliferation of those mobiles will result in a critical mass. More people will search for the next bank or ATM, Chinese Restaurant or store selling a particular brand nearby.
Semantic SEO
While semantic search is slow to catch on and the attempts to implement have been far from perfect I’ve seen apps and methods often with SEO in mind using semantic technology. That is technology understanding the meaning instead of just counting words or links like Google, technology to bring about a significantly better user experience. It might be a search engine that soon everybody will add to hers or his site or another kind of add on. In 2009 this overdue development will finally get traction.
Rankings and PageRank
Rankings and PageRank will finally go the way of hits. Serious webmasters will care less and less for them and focus on real website success metrics.
Google monopoly
The Google search monopoly will become even more apparent in more and more countries. Facing it the people will increasingly seek alternatives and as other search engines aren’t better turn to other ways of finding what they look for on the Web, mostly in social contexts like blogs, communities, social bookmarking and browsing services.
Shift from traditional advertising to search marketing
As TV and print advertising budgets will melt search marketing budgets will be stepped up to get measurable results and a clearly defined ROI beyond simple brand recognition.
Shift from PPC to organic SEO
People spending massive amounts for a while on PPC ads like Google Adwords will more often consider investing in long term organic SEO.
Google employees switching sides
The 10k “Permanent temps” who have been “downsized” at Google will switch sides and work both for SEO companies, Google competitors and come up with their own business ideas.
Value SEO vs SEO tricks
The value in SEO will outdo old school SEO tricks. Content creation, social networking and reputation building will be key more than ever. The tasks of SEO will shift from programming, website tweaking.
SEO criminals vs professionals
With the emergence of hacking blogs and websites “for SEO reasons” the black hats have crossed the line between cheating search engines and downright criminal behaviour. Whoever will want to be taken seriously as a SEO professional will have to deal with ethics.
Link popularity vs real popularity
Links will become less important for search engine algorithms. With more and more data coming in from personalization, SearchWiki, Google Chrome and Google Analytics etc., Google will lower the value of links to rank websites and based on real popularity with users instead.
Social Media and Blogging
Oversaturation
While already in 2008 we’ve seen stagnation in user numbers on the major networks, we’ve seen plenty of new sites appear and get their share of users. The end is near though. Most users willing to use social web applications are already oversaturated. Second rate sites like Pownce or Me.Dium which already gave up or changed their business model will thus disappear.
Services on Top
While conventional time consuming social sites adding work load to it’s users won’t thrive anymore due to oversaturation more and more new services will have their break through that use the existing data and activity for it’s own apps. What does that mean? You won’t have to submit to Digg, you’ll become automatically popular on Microblogging Buzz or elsewhere due to tweeting. People won’t solely watch biased vote biased sites but the real activity on social networks.
Blogging a Must
While 2008 was still a year you had to convince people in business to blog in 2009 blogs will be standard and those not having one will simply fall behind. With social media and blogs being even on the forefront of a successful presidential campaign business owners who are just aware of the Internet solely offering storefronts and static pages full of corporate and sales gibberish will lose like McCain did.
Bloggers will organize
With the increasing professionalism, stress and bad pay as well the danger of being sued or even jailed for blogging, bloggers will start organizing and strike back.
Social media metrics
Relationship and social authority measurement will finally surface. Social media influence and success will become measurable and thus make short term tactic like link baiting less attractive than long term engagement. The technology has already been patented and several solutions are being prepared.
Social commerce
Ecommerce and online shopping will become more and more blogging and social media. Conventional online shops offering no way of socializing and feedback will fall behind.
Marketing
Non-intrusive marketing
We have permission, viral and inbound marketing already to name just a few ways of marketing without the in your face appearance of advertising. Still all those practices are nonetheless recognizable as marketing and thus sometimes annoying or unable to get the message through. In 2009 non-intrusive marketing will be more and more providing information you need, where and when you need it.
Combination of CRM, Web Analytics and SEO
Already services and apps like GoodBarry or DemandBase combine customer relationship management with web analytics and SEO. Business owners who won’t make the connection between those three will lose out on leads compared to their competition.
Social media strategy
While social media still is regarded by some new to it as the quick drop in and shout place most marketers have by now noticed that it does not work that way. Yes, instead of short sighted push tactics you need a long term social media strategy which pulls your customers and makes them embrace you for the value you offer.
Emerging markets
Emerging markets that is non-US, Europe or Japan will finally be more lucrative than the good old western hemisphere. Due to the market crash, demographics and countries like India, China and Brazil catching up we’ll see products geared towards other audiences than “us”. Prepare new language versions for your site.
Online video
Online video will finally become the most important medium online like in real life where TV is more powerful than the print press. We’ve seen cameras sold for less than 100$ in 2008, new models only slightly more expensive already offer HD video. We have millions of people using those plus sites like YouTube and Vimeo sporting higher quality videos plus even MTV going online with their archives.
Software
Webware and browser as OS
Both proprietary and open source desktop software will witness a further slump in popularity as browser based web apps and SaaS (software as a service) will become more common place. Offering downloadable software will become more difficult in a broadband environment. The browser will become a second OS with both web based applications and software being added as browser extensions.
Linux more popular
With Linux popular on Netbooks, a special Linux for Netbooks coming up, and other computer hardware sales going down by 50% Windows and Mac OS will both lose market share.
Cloud computing
Cloud computing will change the way companies operate their networks with the introduction network computers like Pano.
Log ins
Third party log ins like OpenID will finally overcome logging in 20 times a day.
Data portability
Web users fed up with logging in everywhere anew will also embrace portable data solutions which enable them to access and “transport” data between different web services.
These 30 web trends for 2009 are not new for those who watch the web closely. You might not agree and some may not materialize or have their break through in 2009 already but most of these will at least have some impact next year.
In case I forgot something please add it. In case you disagree with one of the web trends for 2009 I predict please explain why.
What are your hopes for the new year beyond what you expect will happen anyway? What do you think do we need on the Web in 2009?
RE: IE 6.0 Support
While dropping below 20% is important, 20% on a site like the New York Times still means abandoning 20,000 users on a daily basis. Can anyone afford to do that? I think not…
Dennis: true. It will of course depend on industry and target market. Main stream websites like the NYT will be the last to follow suit. With progressive enhancement even they can step up of CSS2 and 3 usage.
Sites covering the latest in design, tech or that ignore modem users already will be first. There are many already. When people start noticing their browser not working they will finally upgrade.
Why I.E. ? I think FIrefox should be there.
Google employees switching sides
The 10k “Permanent temps” who have been “downsized” at Google will switch sides and work both for SEO companies, Google competitors and come up with their own business ideas.
– I think this will be very interesting…We have seen a couple of their ideas already and I like the video idea. Cuil, well.. I guess I should check it out again, but it hasn’t looked good yet.
Hi,
I completely agree with below mentioned by you:
”Google monopoly
The Google search monopoly will become even more apparent in more and more countries. Facing it the people will increasingly seek alternatives and as other search engines aren’t better turn to other ways of finding what they look for on the Web, mostly in social contexts like blogs, communities, social bookmarking and browsing services.”
But I want to add that another new search engine will enter this market and Google will be left becuse Google does not meet search needs completely because of its link popularity technique. Sometimes a web site including no content -empty-can be the first position on the first page on Google because of link popularity technique especially with links forum web sites..Bad technology…
Hey,
Wonderful blog post.
I agree with your points:)
Keep Updating!!!
is a monopoly for google such a bad thing? For a user if they can get the info they want from one place then it will grow in popularity. Having tried other searchs none come close to google for everyday searches.
But like all monopolies they will be challenged, and its a big enough cake for sizable competitors to emerge, who are very good at their own niche.
If google begins to exploit its monopoly (advertising costs rise) then this will open doors for others.
david
http://www.Joots.co.uk
I believe the Google Monopoly is already happening. I hope they can stop them at some point but I am guessing they will just like Microsoft has been stopped somewhat. Great post and thoughts.
IE6′s share falling below 20%? Too good to be true, considering 95% of our clients’ (colleges and universities, public sector clients) target market is using IE6 (due to the lack of updating of machines at the premises) we will need to support IE6 in full just before hell freezes over I fear.
I can also see 2009 to be the year of browser wars (with Google Chrome being out of beta) and more importantly the year of accessibility concerns such as displaying PDF links properly or more in-depth usability testing for public sector websites.
Great article. It is interesting how companies that were never interested in blogging and social media have all of the sudden taken interest. Also, cloud computing has been instrumental in running my business.
:-)
i agree with a lot what you say especially the SEO stuff thank god we will see the end of IE6 pitty could not say the same about microsoft
This is a great post lots of interesting things to ponder
PPC competition
Shift from traditional advertising to search marketing
As TV and print advertising budgets will melt search marketing budgets will be stepped up to get measurable results and a clearly defined ROI beyond simple brand recognition.
The use of PPC has allows the small business take on the giants. If the big players start to throw large budgets at PPC it will become more competitive and expensive. This will present a challenge to these small companies to hold position in the market place.
This could be the driver or market gap for a new search engine to challenge Google. Personally, I like to find that small company at the back of beyond and to think of them packing my unique gift on the kitchen table.
Excellent predictions. I think I’d be satisfied with just one if it were the end of IE6.
That aside, I’d also suggest that the convergence of Social and Mobile will be huge as the two addictions of Crackberries/iPhones and Facebook mashup.
I think we’ll also begin to see more personal transparency. Separation between personal and professional is dissolving as Facebook breaks down those walls – for better or worse
I think that 20% is just for the w3schools site which you would expect to be more tech-savvy ppl – hence the high percentage of Firefox users.
I am sure the percentage of people using IE in general will be a lot higher. “Joe Bloggs” who visits general sites e.g. BBC News, checks there Hotmail properly wont even know what Firefox is.
Oversaturation of Social Medias >> I think what we will definitely start to see the decline in the variety of these sites because the dominant players are finding new ways to expand their reach and will squeeze out the latest “johnny-come-lately”. Twiitter is expanding all over the place, with CNN heavily promoting it, and the Twitter API is being re-purposed for use on other sites like Boston Tweet. By making themselves more accessible for other companies to implement into their websites, the market leaders in social media will secure their top-dog seats.
I like what you say about “light weight websites.” Cell phones are becoming ever more important.
I believe that for ’09 magazine layouts will be creating a huge presense in web design. Along with that, there will also be more typography based sites.
I can’t wait for it.
If Google Search Engine does not change PR -link popularity etc,new search engines showing the right search (arama) results might enter search market.
IE6 should have disappeared from the market long ago. optimizing site design for so many different browser is just ….
I think the most important trend in this article is changing the way site owners measure success, instead of rankings – they should start measuring conversions.
This will require many sites to change their structure and include measurable conversions.
I really do hope we see the end of IE6. Its annoying when you have a client who only uses ie6 and will probably never upgrade.
There are even predictions that users of OS’s won’t even need hard drives in the near future, it will be all cloud computing, but for now we have browser OS’s.
I still can’t believe people have managed to go so long using old browsers such as IE6. I even had a client in the pasy using IE4!
This is an excellent set of resource’s compiled here, and clearly the web is going to take over the desktop. Now the only thing you’ll need in the future is a monitor with wireless broadband capabilities and the ability to run a web browser. :)
I love what you say about IE 6! Good riddance to that browser!
I believe the Google Monopoly is already happening.
I hope they can stop them at some point but I am guessing they will just like Microsoft has been stopped somewhat. Great post and thoughts.
I still can’t believe people have managed to go so long using old browsers such as IE6. I even had a client in the pasy using IE4!