The Future of Web Development

The web development industry is constantly changing and evolving every day of our lives. While we may not notice these changes each day while it’s happening, we can look back as little as only a few months into the past and see that a lot of things we do now that are much different than what we did in the past. Because our work is in one of the world’s fastest-paced industries, it’s important that we try and predict what might be coming up in the future. If we don’t we risk being left in yesterday’s web development dust.

While predicting the future may sound a bit daunting at first, it’s actually pretty easy to see where we’re headed in the next few months and years to come. If you’re a developer who specializes in PSD to CSS/XHTML conversions, you’ve already seen this trend starting to develop. Regular PSD to XHTML/CSS jobs are starting to diminish today while most current jobs now consist of WordPress development or server-side scripting (e.g. PHP). In short, web developers starting to work now more on niche jobs, like open source software customization.

As months go on, developers who charge a premium over “PSD to HTML” development shops are going to need to continue to shift their niche. Maybe there will always be a demand for this type of work, but in order to charge significantly more than today’s “market price”, you will need to differentiate your work from the $50-per-PSD-conversion companies.

More Appreciation for Web Standards

At one time it was tough to sell clients on the importance of valid/standards-compliant and semantic code. Today, with so many different devices and browsers on the market, web standards have become even more important to produce flexible and inter-operable products.

Now, more web browsers are supporting open web standards, and companies are no longer supporting more proprietary software in favor of open technologies, there is stronger demand than ever for coders who can work well with web standards. Developers who focus on outputting compliant code are going to benefit from this trend.

Less Client Work, More Personal Projects

Many developers have stopped taking on as much client work and are now working on their own projects. With the popularity of devices like the iPhone and iPad along with public APIs, this is probably going to become more common in the future. There’s always the potential of someone

creating another Twitter or something similar that will pop up from out of nowhere, and adapting to it will be more attainable with the tools and knowledge that Hour maturing industry has already accumulated. Working on your own projects, however, can offer another benefit. Since the Web continues to evolve so rapidly, you will wind up learning new things as you go along that can be incorporated into client work

Internet Explorer Will Actually Be Cool

It seems Internet Explorer has been around since the beginning of time. But it’s only been around as a force after it demolished Netscape some years ago. It lost it’s edge for a while, but Microsoft never gives up, and now, whether we like it or not, it’s coming back strong again. Now, with the new IE9, there are finally reasons to think that it’s come back from the grave and may actually become a modern browser with standards-compliant HTML5 and CSS3 support.Another benefit of IE9 is that IE6 is now going to be three browsers old. While most of us were able to drop support of IE6, some have still been supporting it. The fact that IE6 is now going to be three browser versions old, plus the fact that it’s almost 10 years old, means that those big corporations that have been hesitant to update their systems will finally be forced to upgrade. There is also an urgent need to upgrade because of safety concerns with IE6, which will help curb its use even more.

Today’s markets are shrinking constantly, so it is more and more important that we continue to learn as well as be able to use other skills when necessary, in case we need to quickly switch. It’s not uncommon for web developers to work in several languages on one page and on one site. Knowing other languages and technologies also helps keep things interesting and avoids burnout. As the web development industry constantly changes and evolves, being able to look at least a little bit into the future can be the KEY to understanding where we are heading and how we need to prepare.