The Social Network

It's that awkward moment when you go to your high school reunion and see the guy that sat behind you in senior English class. Small talk is exchanged: "Hey, how's life treated you since high school?" But you both know the small talk is unnecessary. Why? Because you checked his Facebook a week ago and since then, he has taken the world's best nap, gotten down on Friday, and been completely humiliated by his favorite sports team. Small talk is obsolete.

It's not just all of your old high school classmates getting socially networked; small and large companies alike are jumping onto the bandwagon. And why not? Think about the days when companies had to print out thousands of letters or advertisements to announce a new product. A waste of time, a waste of resources, and let's be honest, you didn't really care to get that extra junk in the mail. This is a huge advantage for businesses.

Cisco was recently given the title 'Most Engaging Brand on Twitter'. They routinely announce things on their account (@CiscoSystems) such as webcasts and news articles that benefit their clients. Cisco has begun using cloud computing, and they routinely post links to articles referencing what this means for the company. Juniper (@JuniperNetworks) has coined the hashtag 'geek of the week', which links you to Facebook where users can read an excerpt about people such as Robert Metcalfe.

Some people will argue that one social networking outlet is better than the other, but the truth is both Juniper and Cisco tend to use both equally. Since Twitter has a one hundred and forty character limit, they tend to use the services of Ow.ly or Bit.ly to shorten links that lead to Facebook. Facebook pages can contain more content than Twitter, such as support pages and areas where users can post questions or raves.

Now, it's that non-awkward moment when you go to your high school reunion and see the guy who sat behind you in senior English. There will be small talk, yes, but now you can check Twitter and let him know that your favorite company just announced a seminar you would love to attend, and you can't talk because you'll be too busy RSVPing via the link they provided. Sure, he will probably think that you have gone a bit crazy since high school, but you will know the truth; you are on the cutting edge of networking, and knowledge is literally just a click away.

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Web Design Has Changed Forever!

Web design used to be so much easier. We would design a website and people would view that design in pretty much the same way, i.e. on a desktop computer screen.

Nowadays, that's all changed. More and more people are viewing websites on an iPad, mobile phone, laptop or even TV. These devices all have different screen sizes and shapes (portrait or landscape). This has forced us to completely change the way we think about design.

A full size website does not perform well on a mobile device. They are hard to navigate and slow to load. This negatively affects sales conversion rates.

We have had to simplify our web designs and make them fluid, so that they can automatically adapt to these different devices. This approach is called responsive design.

With responsive websites, the content of a web page dynamically resizes and rearranges itself to best fit the screen it is being viewed on. The content is the same but the code recognises what device is beinge used and then delivers a different style sheet which changes the design of the website accordingly.

This approach ensures that the user can see a website in it's best format for the device they happen to be using. The conversion rate of responsive websites is far higher than standard websites as it is difficult to use a full 'desktop' version of a website on a mobile device for example.

Touchscreen

Another big game changer has been touchscreen. The fact that people increasing use their fingers, instead of a mouse, to navigate a website, has brought about some big changes to web and mobile design. For example, buttons have to be bigger and navigation much simpler eg complex drop down menus or rollovers dont work well with touchscreen.

Touchscreen has also allowed for longer pages which people can scroll down with their finger, rather than breaking pages up with lots of 'next page' links.

TV

A lot has been talked about designing for smaller screens on mobiles yet the future for the internet also lies with television. TV screens are much larger than computers so websites will also have to scale up as well as down to fit this format.

Summary

Although all of these changes have made our designers' lives harder, it has brought a lot of positive change. We have to make designs simpler and content more concise, which actually makes for a better website, no matter which device it is viewed upon.

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