It’s still January and therefore it’s still appropriate to be looking ahead at what remains a very young year, with emergent trends that you can still learn from in time to compete in the e-commerce market. Indeed, industry news sources and general information sites are still publishing content describing the trends for 2016 with regard to such things as local small business marketing strategies, web design services, search engine optimization, and so on.

As an example, Inquisitr published an article this past week pointing to some of the opportunities that exist for local web marketing service providers, in terms of benefitting from an understanding of current trends toward mobile web design, the prevalence of social media, and what’s known as “the internet of things.”

We’ve previously talked about how the increasing popularity of mobile web browsing is affecting the field of web design. Specifically, we’ve talked about how you can use knowledge of these trends to better vet your website redesign and development agency if you’re planning on making changes to your own site in 2016. We’ve also touched upon how the work of a web design company can dovetail with your small business marketing solutions, insofar as site content should reflect an understanding of your target audience and their browsing habits.

In light of the Inquisitr post, we would like to further emphasize that same point. While the article itself can certainly be read just from the perspective of small business web marketing services, a close reading of its observations further emphasizes the important potential overlap between web design and web marketing.

The salient part of the article is where the author dismisses the notion that mobile apps alone might be the wave of the future for reaching customers with online content. “Mobile websites will become more popular as a way to connect,” the article notes. “And Google has already begun giving higher rankings to sites that offer a mobile version.”

This observation goes to show that in 2016, a proper understanding of local small business web marketing solutions can lead to web design and site content that puts your business in a better initial position with regard to climbing the ranks of the search engines and reaching customers on multiple platforms. But it’s easy to imagine losing this advantage if the relevant web marketing information needs to be channeled through multiple hands before it reaches the point of website redesign and development.

In the modern landscape of both web design and web marketing, it is increasingly important to have an integrated approach to these and other elements of your online strategy. That is to say, your web design company should probably be able to double as your provider of internet marketing services. As long as this is the case, your web design can build off of trends in web marketing, while your marketing strategy builds off of relevant trends in web design.

With the massive pool of competition you’ll face in e-commerce throughout the rest of 2016, you can’t afford to fall behind the times in either respect.