Keeping up with New Website Technology

In this day and age the internet is moving at such a fast pace that website users can find it difficult to keep up with all the latest technology and advancements in terms of new functionality, the latest software and the latest techniques to use for their website.

Dependant on which market your website is in, it can differ drastically on the kind of software and functionality that can be used. We are going to concentrate on a minor area of what kinds of technologies and software are going to be used over the coming years.

First of all we are going to touch slightly on Search Engines. We are currently on the 11th of March and the big talk in the SEO world at the moment is that Yahoo and AOL may be merging together to form one search engine. This is big news because AOL uses Google’s search database for their search engine results, meaning the big question here is If Yahoo and AOL merge will both turn to Google for Search? At the moment Google takes the biggest share of the SEO market at 53% and is by far the largest and most used search engine worldwide. Yahoo takes a 17% share, Microsoft's MSN 7%, AOL 6%, Ask Jeeves is 3% and all the other search engines take a 14% cut. If Yahoo and AOL do merge this will mean that Yahoo also may be using Google's system meaning in much harder submissions to Google and making life much more difficult to get a good top 10 ranking in Google.

Figures based as of March 08

So where are websites going? Flash seems to be playing a bigger role in every day websites nowadays generally because you can achieve much more animation with Flash than you can with animated GIf's. Flash, if designed correctly can give you great animation with low loading times and low file sizes, if designed incorrectly it can work in the opposite with large loading times and large file sizes meaning users get aggravated and leave your site which is the worst case scenario. There are many other implications with Flash and that is that Search Engines cannot view the content in flash, it literally just sees a flash document and will not rank your website dependant on the content in the flash document so this is also another down side to flash. Images are not as incompliant as flash as the search engine can scan the file names of images such as webdesign_image.jpg etc and also you can attach an ALT tag to the image to give it a description and the search engines can also look at this.

Moving on to a more specific market this being the property market. This is one of the areas which has taken off the most recently in terms of online presence. Most property sites display properties on their website with textual information, and imagery of the interior and also the exterior of the property. Two of the main areas we see property sites moving are in 360 degree imagery so you can view the 360 degree view of the interior and exterior of the property. There are incredible pieces of software out there at the moment offering to automate this, but these can cost large amounts of money. There are much easier and cost effective methods to do this. Also there are walkthrough pieces of software to give the user the best possible interaction as to whether the property is for them or not without wasting time going to look at a property. Obviously we all know that a property is one of the largest purchases anyone makes but with property sites such as right move offering thousands of properties online it can be difficult to visit all of these in person.

Here is a good example, you can view 360 and also pan left, right, up and down. Plus you can also zoom in.