Digitalization has come a long way from its beginnings. Endless opportunities are waiting for development, growth, and innovation for SME’s who at times end up facing different challenges compared to their enterprise-size counterparts. One of the biggest mistakes these fast-growing companies do is too little investment and not focusing on their biggest assets- i.e., their website.
Ever increasing evolution in the technologies has upgraded the way of the website development processes in the world. Today, building a website is, in many ways, an exercise of willpower. I can say this because it gets quite tempting to get distracted by the bells and whistles of the tools and methodologies to enhance your design process and forget all about the core. But it's making the best use of innovative web technologies that work for your business.
Over the past few years the rise of web browsers and the introduction of single-page applications, have been growing at a frantic pace. What caused such rapid growth that changed the face of the digital world?
In order to see the future scope and the pace of changes, let’s look back on the recent past when software developers and their clients had to overcome a number of obstacles such as,
- The cross-browser compatibility was a sore issue when each new web-engine release was high stress and a real try out for large-scale web projects.
- The web interfaces were difficult to adapt to various screen sizes.
- The coders and designers struggled for every extra kilobyte of source code to increase web page loading speed
- JavaScript calculations were not reliable
In a nutshell, the true potential of business web application development were completely undervalued. Earlier, the web had been perceived as an infrastructure communication channel between the server and the client-side application. Now, businesses are being empowered with technology innovation and digital transformation.
Important changes that took place in the web industry
- UX Revolution
Google and Apple, the two tech giants have concentrated the UX expertise in their monopolistic hands. Which eventually led to the creation of the unified UI/UX standards in the field of web applications. The unification is based on Material Design (Google) and Human Interface (Apple) policies and allows creating different business apps with zero time for users training.
- Web browser domination
The web view module, i.e. a browser, is the kernel of any application. Day in and day out web browsers have become faster and more efficient. They are able to not only display information but also to carry out calculations, operate with interactive media, store data in the offline mode, etc.
- Back-end evolution
For the past several years, we have witnessed a continuous competition between PHP and ASP.NET technologies for the right to power the most popular backend platforms. By the way, PHP seems to be winning this fight so far, according to the current market share.
- Global accessibility
Ubiquitous Internet access and the widespread use of mobile devices have made it possible to efficiently employ web applications for a bunch of sensitive tasks such as navigation, online text translation, document management, and so on.
- Frameworks for web applications
The rapid development of commercial and open source frameworks has completely changed the Web App industry. Here are the major changes,
- Development speed boost
Web development time has significantly reduced due to the use of open source frameworks such as PHP, Magento, WordPress, Bootstrap, Apache Spark, Spring Boot, etc.
- More development tools and components
Rich development environments can be enjoyed with a large number of media components and visualization tools that ensure the creation of sophisticated web apps.
- Strict quality control
All the components of frameworks are developed in compliance with industry standards. Because of adjusted and unified frameworks modules usage, the quality of new web applications has been improved.
- Development cost reduction
A number of dedicated specialists appeared involved in web app development. This resulted in the average development rates decreasing.
- Introduction of cross-platform mobile app development
It may interest you to know that the market is expected to reach $7.5 billion in 2018. The number of cross-platform mobile app development tools and resources is soaring. These days there are plenty of frameworks to choose from.