#BOLDDIGIROUNDUP: WRAPPING UP 2017

With each year, digital gets increasingly sophisticated, constantly delivering new tools and improvements for businesses to take advantage of to reach the right people. In this article, we have attempted to review the trends in digital and tech for 2017 as well as to look ahead to what is to come this year.

If you have been avoiding the Internet for most of the past twelve months, don’t worry! You can finally catch up with what’s been happening and go Boldly into 2018.

WEB DESIGN

In the past couple of years, we have seen a range of trends such as full-page images on the home page with down arrows signalling to more content, minimalist navigation bars, ghost buttons and sharp-edged square “tiles” in the same vain as Instagram.

We have also noticed a juxtaposition between the monochrome school of branding and the fans of flat pastel palettes. Icons, colour-blocked segments and large feature text have also been prominent. Video has played a major role and shows no sign of going away.

According to E-Consultancy’s Ben Davis, 2018 will see the appetite for flat design fade away in favour of the resurgence of drop shadows and gradients. He also claims the “ghost button” (the see-through button with only an outline and text) will be exorcized from our websites as, although it looks amazing, it doesn’t convert as well as its opaque counterpart. 2018 will continue to witness the adoption of sticky areas on the page, such as fixed navigation menu bars (the bit at the top that doesn’t go away when you scroll).

Also expect to notice an improvement in website performance by improved scroll effects, for example a fixed background while only the foreground moves, plus more serif fonts and rounded corner images and boxes à la Google and Twitter’s curvy interfaces.

SOCIAL MEDIA

As ever, social created a splash in 2017 – Besides technology improvements, ethical questions surrounding privacy, authenticity and liberty of expression were big in users’ minds.

It was rather a busy year, so here are the highlights:

• 2017 was the year that Facebook has had to take measures to ward off “fake news” rolling out “Related articles” and also needed to consider transparency in how people use Ads Manager.

• 2017 was also the year of improved advertising with the launch of Snapchat Snap Publisher, and Instagram allowing brands to advertise through Stories.

• Linked In finally got on board the video bandwagon (What took them so long?).

• Pinterest continued to push the boundaries with visual search and recommendations for shoppers by introducing custom QR-like codes.

According to Entrepreneur, we need to fasten our seat belts and get ready for more brands messaging us directly through WhatsApp and Messenger. We can also expect more augmented reality and live streaming. In addition, Twitter will need to decide its future, while it is hoped that Facebook will officially roll out “Spaces”, a tool that gets friends to hang out in VR using Oculus technology.

CYBER SECURITY

You must have been asleep or under a rock for most of 2017 and probably a bit before if you haven’t heard the term GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) – This is a replacement to the data protection directive from 1995 and will tighten up the rules on how data is being processed.

2017 was a crazy year for data breach revelations. Big names like Yahoo, Uber, the NHS and even government bodies were targeted by cyber-attacks.

Wannacry, Bad Rabbit and Notpetya were three of the worst viruses to have caused havoc across the globe and CNN Money predicts more to come in 2018.

These attacks exposed vulnerabilities within data warehouses which called into question the wisdom of keeping so much customer data on file. Many of these vulnerabilities could have been addressed by paying better attention to existing holes in security.

SEO

SEO continues to evolve. With no-one quite able to fathom the Google algorithm, marketers are left at the search giant’s mercy.

However, Search Engine Land has attempted to shine some light on current trends for search, pointing to website security, content length and link building as important factors for ranking in Google SERPs.

In this article, Hubspot has described the search landscape in the current climate, emphasising the shift away from traditional search engine marketing towards search within social and apps.

Experts have predicted that mobile-first indexing, voice search and better personalisation on results pages will be increasingly apparent in 2018.