Word Press Web Development Trends: Past, Present, And Future Essay.

Development of Themes

Discuss about the Word Press Web Development Trends.

In today’s digitized world, web development is the second name for internet and the web is increasing an exponential growth in WebPages and applications that are interlinked over the internet. Web developers have created new digital experiences that are more immersive. This section explores how web development emerged as the industry, where it stands today and what would be its likely future.

Web development industry is seeing a continuous evolution with changes happening fast. Within few months, things take new shapes and new capabilities are added on websites. The web development started with HTML programming in which developers hard-coded using attributes of the web language and deployed the code through FTP server to see the results. However, these were static websites that did not serve the needs of real time applications so later was brought the concept of backend programming where pages were dynamically loaded by linking front end interfaces with back end database systems that were used to retrieve data using back end scripting languages like PHP, VBScript and PERL.

While server-side development was still the trend in late 1990s, the emergence of framework programming with Ruby on Rails completely changed the web development pattern. This illustrated the power of open source which has become the most promising trend in web development today. There are still significant changes happening every day in web development trends and the change is likely to follow even in future. Changing trends would affect the employment scenarios and programmers and web developers would have to adapt to the new demands of the web space.

While programmers took care of the back end transactions and communications, the front end management involves management of design and layout of a website. With open source content management systems like Wordpress, developers are able to create themes that allow user customize the front end of a website. These themes decide how content retrieved from database would be displayed on the website, where it would be placed on the web page, what typography would it use, and what specific actions would be required on specific types of user devices. In Wordpress, the themes are launched using two types of files including index.php which is the template file and style.css which gives the style to the template pages (Wordpress, 2016).

Web started with introduction of HTTP in 1991 followed by development of HTML language in 1992. Till 1994, HTML was the primary web language used for development of web pages that ran on browsers like Netscape, opera and Internet explorer. In the late 1994, HTML 2 was introduced soon followed by addition of SSL in 1995 and introduction of HTML 3 in late 1995. With HTML 3, new languages like JavaScript and Flash were added to the world of web pages by 1996. By 1997 and 1998, HTML was upgraded to HTML 3.2 and HTML 4 after which came designing scripts like CSS2 in 1998 followed by AJAX coding that came into being in 1999. By 2002, new browsers like Safari and Firefox were introduced following by addition of XML scripting. 2008 was the start of the era of designer web applications that had rich interfaces that were developed using CSS 2D, 3D and CSS3 animation. The year 2011 saw addition of touch events and full screen APIs that paved way for newest and more sophisticated developments in the web space (Google, 2016).

Future of Web development

This section explores the world of web development after this focusing on advances seen in the web development in recent years and explores the possibilities of more developments in the near future.

Some of the trends have already started to get visible and are likely to become more prominent in near future in the field of web development. Some of these include:

Reducing demand for PSD to CSS conversion: PSD to CSS or XHTML conversion would not remain a significant specialization that would get huge demand as there have been shifts in the development space and more developers are being involved in Wordpress development, server-side scripting, and other types of niche work such as customization of open source software.

Increasing importance of Web Standards: Web standards are gaining more importance than ever with more and more open source technologies coming into being. Companies are shifting from propriety software development model to adoption of open source software systems. Adoption of IT4IT framework by companies like Shell and Delta Lloyd are classic examples of this shift on a large scale. These companies have been known for development of propriety software but have recently adopted IT4IT open source framework for its IT management practices.

There are different types of web development themes that were introduced over the past few years and some of them are gaining popularity as more and more developers use them today. In 2016, flat design was the most used theme and responsive design became mandatory. Mobile-first design was another leap in the development of web themes as developers used touch and gesture scripts to create features that allowed mobile-focused interactions (Weller, 2014).

During the same year, conversational interfaces like chatbots were added to designs. The current year 2017 is seeing companies moving towards emotionally intelligent designs which would humanize the web technology in near future. In coming five years, a lot of developments are likely to be seen in emotion-sensing technology

Development of human intelligence in the web technologies has already started to begin with programs like Siri that can mimic human voice, Google RankBrain update that can identify semantic speech patterns in humans, and AI assistance algorithms that have the capacity to improve storage systems by allowing more efficient and faster edits (Alton, 2016).

A number of webpage elements have become popular and are gaining space in theme development such that different styles of design, presentation and customization are offered for them. These include sliders, background, animation, responsive, and frameworks, menus (Brown, 2016).

Future Trends in Web development

With differences in managing these elements and use of different emerging technologies, some types of themes are likely to gain popularity or evolve in coming five years such as:

Responsive Themes: Having a responsive theme is no more a choice but a necessity for developers as more and more users are using different devices as well as different variety of browsers such that any web application needs to fit well for viewers using any kind of platform or any kind of browser. Thus, developers have to learn and advance their skills in the area of responsive web application development.

Multipurpose Themes: These types of themes can allow a developer develop almost any type of website with any types of features included with high level of customization and personalization possible. Multipurpose themes allow much flexibility to developers and thus, gaining popularity.

VR Optimized Themes: Another technology trend that would affect the development of themes in coming future is rise of virtual reality which is now being experienced in web interfaces (Lindberg, 2017). Initially, Virtual reality was only associated with gaming sites but now plugins are being developed to provide support for VR images as well as videos on any website.

Mobile First Themes: Use of mobile devices for browsing has become more popular than desktop based search. The world internet usage report of 2016 states that market share of desktop devices for internet surfing has reduced to 48.74% while for mobile; it has increased to 51.26%. Thus, mobile optimized website has become not the trend but a compulsion and the world is slowly moving towards mobile first strategy. Even Google has started to recommend mobile first strategy for getting higher ranking in SEO (Spaco Technologies, 2017).

Video Headers in Themes: Wordpress themes now come with a feature called video header which allows users to create video based headers on a web page. Video headers are becoming trend through not adopted by most yet can see some more advances in near future.

Besides these specific theme types, different UI patterns have proliferated with responsive theme designs making way for introduction of different patterns of User Interface such as split screen, blocks grid layout for ecommerce, animated stories in layouts, long scrolls for single page view, and so on.

Conclusion

As the web world sees frequent changes happening and with introduction of new concepts and technologies like open source framework, virtual reality, and smart artificial intelligence, the trends of web development would change further and based on the needs of future, programmers and we  developers would have to learn and adopt to the changing requirements. Thus, the subject of web development is of prime importance as it is going to affect the way entire world works as most of the world is going to get digitized in near future such that web development would become the most promising career for software programmers.

References

Alton, L. (2016, January 7). App-Improvement AI And The Future Of Web Development. Retrieved April 15, 2017, from TechCrunch: https://techcrunch.com/2016/01/07/is-app-improvement-ai-the-future-of-web-development/

Brown, R. A. (2016, January 30). A Forecast of 2016 Web Design Trends. Retrieved April 15, 2017, from elegantthemes: https://www.elegantthemes.com/blog/resources/2016-web-design-trends

Google. (2016). The Evolution of the Web. Retrieved April 15, 2017, from Evolution of Web: https://www.evolutionoftheweb.com/?hl=en

Lindberg, O. (2017, Jan 10). 17 Web Design Trends To Watch in 2017. Retrieved April 15, 2017, from Shopify: https://www.shopify.com/partners/blog/17-web-design-trends-you-need-to-know-in-2017

Spaco Technologies. (2017). These WordPress Web Development Trends Will Dominate 2017! Have You Implemented Them Yet? Retrieved April 15, 2017, from Spaco Technologies: https://www.spaceotechnologies.com/wordpress-web-development-trends-2017/

Weller, N. B. (2014, September 17). Web Design Trends To Look Out For In 2015. Retrieved April 15, 2017, from Elegant Themes: https://www.elegantthemes.com/blog/resources/web-design-trends-to-look-out-for-in-2015

Wordpress. (2016). What is a Theme? Retrieved April 15, 2017, from Wordpress.org: https://developer.wordpress.org/themes/getting-started/what-is-a-theme/