When creating your new website, or thinking of updating your existing one to be on top of the digital trends and make the best user experience out of any visit to it, you will need to put some things in mind.
- Focus on participating in Social media conversations, instead of creating and managing pages. Social media is about personal interaction and conversation, and people don't invite brands into those conversations. In 2013, we'll see a shift from brands trying to build their own social platforms; instead, they'll start participating in ways that provide consumer value.
- You need 2 pages for mobiles redirection (one for smart phones and other for tablets) Tablet usage tends to be more research and entertainment focused, whereas smartphone usage is more task focused. In 2013, we'll have more ways to target and identify device types and deliver better messaging. This not only applies to digital media opportunities, but also to your response goals and metrics as well.
- Sharing, Sharing, Sharing, and Sharing: It is the year of social media and sharing your good stuff with the world. So make it an easy and simple and interactive fun process.
- QR codes are not trendy anymore as they are not getting pre-installed on new devices and users have to install scanner apps to read them.
- If 2012 was the year of Photo sharing (instagram was a good example), 2013 might be the year of video sharing. so be prepared.
- There's been a lot of discussion about whether or not cookie tracking is an invasion of privacy, and in 2013, there will be some legislation either for or against cookie tracking. And either way, digital advertising will increase.
- Put the Retina Web in mind. After the release of Apple’s MacBook Pro with the retina display it became the new trend that will replace all the old displays. The retina display has over 5 million pixels which is double most others, pixels are no longer noticeable at a normal viewing distance. Traditionally, as resolution would increase everything would get smaller, giving more desktop space. But with 2880x1800 resolution on a 15 inch laptop screen, you don’t necessarily want icons, etc. to be smaller but rather ‘crystal clear’. So to compensate for this new resolution, Apple had to do some clever software tricks by adding a doubling routine. The ‘doubling’ makes all updated apps (apple’s and a few others so far) look awesome! This will also correctly maintain the layout and dimensions of websites, but the downside by doing this is it makes old icons, pictures, and graphics look fuzzy. For example, if you right click and save an image off of a site and it is 100px x 100px, taking a screenshot (what is actually being seen) of the same image it would be 200px x 200px looking twice less clear because the 100px image is being stretched by a factor of 2 horizontally and vertically. The standard dpi (dots per inch) for web graphics used to be 72 but now there are displays that can support almost 300 dpi, close to print quality, making the web need a major overhaul. The solution is to start providing higher quality images. To keep page load speeds optimized, developers can use JavaScript to detect if the display resolution is this new 2880×1800 or higher and only load the high resolution graphics for these users. Since retina users are accustomed to super crisp text and graphics from other apps, they are looking for the same experience on the web, which makes non updated websites seem even worse.
