2018 Web Technology Trends

It can be difficult for agencies to keep up with the ever-changing web technology landscape. In an effort to gain some insight into emerging web trends in 2018, I asked a couple of developers and designers what new tools they are using in 2018 and where they see things going in web dev for the next year. While we’re not quite at the point where we will be grabbing digital spheres while sitting on a mountaintop, there are some really interesting emerging web trends to keep an eye on in 2018.

Romain Wurtz, CTO

Are there any new emerging technologies that you are using and/or seeing?

I think javascript and node.js have taken a huge leap forward the past couple of years and are getting very mature. The drawback for developers getting out of college is that it can get quite overwhelming since it’s still very new (es6) compare to PHP or Java which have been taught for years at school. Knowing that Angular, React and Vue.js are getting popular it’s quite interesting to run the frontend and backend in 1 language from a resource standpoint for dedicated web applications (not regular websites or blogs).

For an agency, I wouldn’t recommend it just yet since it will take some time to get up and running, and some clients might not understand some of the drawbacks (SEO). For long-term applications with a lot of API requests it can definitely fill up some gaps, take a look at hapi.js – used by Walmart to handle Black Friday for example.

Do you still think it’s reasonable to build professional websites with WordPress? Is there a better alternative that will allow companies to do updates themselves?

Short answer: NO for anything outside of blogs (which it does a great job at!). I personally gave up on WordPress 4 or 5 years ago to go towards newer solutions. There is now a lot of alternatives but one of my favorite CMS by far is Craft CMS. It’s architecture put it between a custom CMS and a solution like WordPress. It allows for flexibility and speed, driven by an interesting set of functionalities and logic out of the box. It does involve a little more work than a typical WordPress at first (setup, templates,…) but the code is a lot cleaner and long-term I have yet to see an issue with updates. Speed, security and reliability are some of the main factors every clients should consider which can now be fulfilled easily.

Trevor Polischuk, Software Engineer

Are there any new emerging technologies that you are using and/or seeing?

The biggest developments in the past 3-5 years has really been the rise of the front end frameworks. Angular (google) , react (Facebook) and ember (OSS). Here’s the interesting part: they all suck. Somewhere along the line, developers got disatisfied with the way HTML has worked for the past 20 years and decided that we should render everything in JavaScript. Unfortunately it is a nightmare for SEO because most crawlers don’t execute JS, it craps all over the conventions of forward and back, bookmarks, and URLs, and makes the rendered HTML a crazy generated mess. At our current job, we are getting all of the pain points and none of the benefit, and are actively looking to refactor out of this trend. You see lot of crossover right now of web technologies into other realms. The app framework Electron lets developers create native applications that render via a bundled ‘browser’ and attempt to solve the ever present problem: write once, run everywhere. Companies like Slack, Discord, Spotify, and Github’s Atom text editor have executed this well.

Many technologies have tried to solve this, nobody does it perfectly. Electron does it the best. The bleeding edge technology stuff on the web is all about distributed. The next generation of BitTorrent like technologies is going to redefine if we even need data centers even more. GUN.js is a distributed database that really turns the conventions on their head. The blockchain is the real deal. VISA is going to get wiped out by a Bitcoin-like currency/application if the traditional finance class keeps their head in the sand for too long. But even after the currency apocalypse, Trump starts a nuclear war, and we realize you can’t eat money, people will still be making great websites on WordPress. Mark my words.