48% of people surveyed pointed to website design as the number one factor in deciding the credibility of a business. If your site looks like it was designed in the 90s, then people won’t find you credible. It’s that simple.

And yet, web development isn’t as simple as people assume. Your customers and clients put you on the line for things that are more complicated than a Swiss Army knife.

You want to follow standards such as two-factor security protocols, but you want to make it easy for customers to find your information and access their information on your site.

As it turns out, these are the kinds of concerns most website owners have. They’re worried about the same things you are. Thus, it’s important to find out what’s trending in web development before you change anything on your site. We’ve got the 2020 trends below.

Modular Design

A while back someone invented modular cell phones. You could swap out components like you could swap lego pieces on your Lego Death Star. But it never took off. It was too clunky and difficult to use.

But modular design in a virtual environment is a different story. There are no real space concerns in a virtual environment such as a website. In fact, using set assets makes web development that much more accessible.

For example, you might want more video content (a wise choice considering that according to 316 Strategy Group, 53% of consumers will engage with a brand after watching video content). If you have a video module that allows you to quickly embedded a video with controls and interaction already coded and ready to go in one neat package, you’ll save time.

This is a step up from templates. A template is all-encompassing and not flexible. Modules are smaller set bits of a webpage like the lego example above. These bits should fit together without the need for restructuring.

Pieces must be designed so they cannot fit together incongruously. This makes web development almost idiot-proof.

Neural Networks

We love comparing computers to brains because they “think”. But as Turing put it, machines don’t think as we do. And that’s a good thing.

Artificial intelligence is a blanket term for anything from programmed NPCs in a computer game to full machine learning algorithms that need to be trained to function the way we want them.

A small yet powerful subsection of artificial intelligence, especially machine learning is the neural network. And like the brain, the neural network is about inputs and outputs.

It searches for matches and looks for dependent relationships. It must be trained just like any machine learning algorithm. This takes time.

But once it works, it works well.

How will web developers use it in the future? One example might be website building itself. You could feed the neural network hundreds or thousands of websites and tell it what’s good and what’s bad about them. It will eventually learn the elements of a good website. Once it knows the elements of a good website, it can build a website on its own.