Our previous post at this blog explored one analyst’s take on trends to look for in ecommerce website design and development in the coming year. Now we’d like to bring your attention to a rather similar article at Entrepreneur.com. However, this one is notably different insofar as it looks back over the past year instead of forward to the coming one; it identifies more trends overall; and it focuses on more than just ecommerce sites.

The new article therefore gives you something to consider if you’re looking for informational website design in Charlotte, NC and you want someone who can help you emulate the best recent examples of design in that or any other category.

As we move toward the end of the year, there will likely be more of these sorts of articles, giving you an opportunity to seriously challenge your web design and development company before setting them loose on a project in early 2016. But there is a limit to how much difference you’ll find across multiple articles, provided that each analyst knows his industry as well as he claims to.

If you paid attention to our previous blog post, you’ll already know what we mean when we say the new article is an opportunity to challenge your web design agency or your small business web marketing solutions. As we noted before, for someone who isn’t experienced in the web design and development industry, the value of these sorts of articles is not to provide an opportunity for the site owner to adopt the observed trends on his own. Rather, it’s an opportunity to acquire a slightly better understanding of the work done by your contractors. And that in turn gives you the opportunity to work more closely with them.

The trends outlined by Entrepreneur run the gamut from easy to understand and recognize – like minimalist design and Google Maps integration – to highly technical features that are likely to be unfamiliar to the average web user – such as scalable vector graphics.

You should look over all of the observed trends and decide what you understand and what you don’t. The first category will give you your own ideas about whether to follow or buck the trends, and this can give rise to serious discussions in planning sessions with your web design and development company. Meanwhile, the second category will set you up with opportunities to test the company’s knowledge and encourage them to give you a much better sense of what will be going on behind the scenes with your web design and small business marketing solutions.

You, the site owner, won’t generally be expected to know much about industry trends or jargon. But if you make an effort and show an interest, your web design and development agency may be more willing and able to work collaboratively with you, and you with them, for the benefit of everyone involved.