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5 design and tech trends for SMEs in 2011

Author's avatar By Danyl Bosomworth 24 Nov, 2010
Essential Essential topic
Marketing innovation
Small and medium businesses...
We"€™ve seen a lot of changes on the internet landscape and how people interact with content within it, mobile and tablet PC's being obvious examples. On top of that there's changing web standards, influenced by that changing technology. Things like HTML5 and CSS3 - as Mashable note, "more and more users are now able to take advantage of the latest and greatest features on the web".
It"€™s tougher for SME's to stay on top or ahead of the game, but not impossible. It's also important than businesses do in order to remain competitive. Here's Mashable's 2010/2011 for design trends for SME's - summarised below:
  1. Drop the Flash - More and more sites and web developers are moving away from Flash-only solutions in lieu of video, animation and navigation.What does your audience need and value? Flash is not even accessible on most mobile devices, though great for rich applications, but for businesses who aren"€™t providing that sort of experience, check out point 5, below.
  2. Leverage Web Fonts - Typography is really important as part of any web design and historically customizing it has been a nightmare. As a result, we've been used to "web-safe fonts" or using workarounds like text images - or Flash (see above!). Thanks to services like TypeKit and Google Web Fonts, it"€™s now possible to use web fonts on your own site with very little effort.
  3. Mobile Compatible Sites - Make your web site small-screen friendly. That means ensuring that your site loads faster over cellular data connections and that any content is better formatted for the screens of smaller devices, making it easier to access and understand. This is an important point as smartphone usage soars and there's now a lot of tools and services that make it easy to optimize for mobile devices.
  4. Inspired By Tumblr (and I'd suggest - still - WordPress) - The popular microblogging / blogging platform Tumblr, like WordPress, is a great way to quickly and easily post and share content as well as get interaction on your site such as visitor feedback. Whereas WordPress is already very well established, Tumblr is becoming more popular. Mashable make a good point that even if you don"€™t use Tumblr for your site or blog, you can incorporate elements of the influential Tumblr style "€” think of icons, well-styled typography for titles and headings, and a minimalist layout.
  5. The Future: HTML5 and CSS3 - Admittedly it's a bit early yet for most of us, but we know how fast the web moves. Aside from a few dinosaur browsers, the very latest versions of the major web browsers "€” Internet Explorer,Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari and Opera "€” all support CSS3 and HTML5 features and elements. And, most smartphone s now support advanced CSS3, JavaScript and HTML5 features, too. Experiment with HTML5 or CSS3 elements on your small business website. Mashable note that "it"€™s possible to use techniques that will offer an enhanced view on modern browsers but degrade elegantly on systems that don"€™t support the latest and greatest". Look at these projects to get started.
Author's avatar

By Danyl Bosomworth

Dan helped to co-found Smart Insights in 2010 and acted as Marketing Director until leaving in November 2014 to focus on his other role as Managing Director of First 10 Digital. His experience spans brand development and digital marketing, with roles both agency and client side for nearly 20 years. Creative, passionate and focussed, his goal is on commercial success whilst increasing brand equity through effective integration and remembering that marketing is about real people. Dan's interests and recent experience span digital strategy, social media, and eCRM. You can learn more about Dan's background here Linked In.

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