Automate it immediately or as a business today to work on the Internet

It is strategically important for business owners to use Internet technologies with maximum benefit. If you made a website or application, then today they will no longer be a competitive advantage by themselves. Business must be familiar with the latest technological trends and be able to use them for its development, only then you can be one step ahead of the competition. One of these trends is the automation of business processes using cloud web and mobile applications.

Digital transformation is increasingly penetrating into all spheres of our life, and the share of mobile users is steadily growing in total Internet traffic. Today, it is already in the order of things to call a taxi, order a pizza, buy a ticket or make an appointment with a doctor using a smartphone.

I have been doing web development for ten years now and I manage an outsourcing IT company. In this article I want to talk about technological trends that are worth paying attention to the business, and how they can help it develop.

Blurring the boundaries between platforms

The freshest trend is maximum adaptation of web applications for any platform. The user wants to feel familiar, using the application in a browser, mobile or desktop application. A good example of adaptation was shown by Slack and Skype, these applications work equally on all platforms. Therefore, the development of cross-platform solutions and PWA (Progressive Web Apps) is becoming increasingly popular.

PWA is a web application that feels like mobile apps, but does not need to be installed, they work in all browsers, users can save access to them using bookmarks or as an application icon on the desktop. Such applications do not need to look in the store, and then download them - they are available on the link in one click.

Due to the glut of the market, mobile applications lose their attractiveness, so the development of PWA can be an excellent alternative, but it must be borne in mind that the capabilities of such applications are inferior to native ones. If you have a complex product or service, it is still worth making a separate application.

Cloud solutions instead of developing from scratch

A successful business without flexibility and transparent processes has little chance of survival in the modern world, especially in the long term. Therefore, it is necessary to have the tools to manage and control business processes. For this there are ready-made services, but often they do not completely solve all the necessary tasks, and you have to develop your tools.

A good solution for creating such applications is the use of cloud technologies. Such services allow you to quickly try and implement new solutions due to the fact that you do not need to deploy the necessary infrastructure for a long and expensive time, as the clouds provide the necessary set of tools out of the box. You can create and launch an application very quickly without writing a single line of backend code, and not have to set up a database. For example, you need to collect statistics on the work of the department, and third-party services that have open APIs are involved in collecting these data. In this case, you can create a program for obtaining and converting the necessary information and its output in a readable form.

The most popular cloud services to create application logic today are: Google and Azure Functions, AWS Lambda. There are frameworks that simplify working with clouds, a good example is Serverless, which allows you to write code on your local computer, and the application will work in the cloud. This logic allows you to focus on writing the application, rather than deploying and setting up the infrastructure.

In my opinion, this direction will only develop and gain momentum.
Cloud computing is more reliable and allows you to quickly establish work and a transparent process of access to data with minimal effort. No need to configure the infrastructure: to raise the database, buy hosting and configure the server configuration. By integrating with popular instant messengers or CRM, you can monitor the status of your business in real time and receive timely notifications of problems or successes.

Customer Experience Control

A business should be able to process the received data, know the preferences of its client and quickly answer its questions. With this help services for processing and analyzing big data and machine learning.

If several years ago such solutions cost a lot of money and require highly qualified specialists, today the technology giants Google, Microsoft, Amazon provide cloud services for solving these tasks.

For example, earlier in order to create and train a chat bot, which would be able to issue relevant information to customer requests, it was necessary to search for rare specialists in machine learning or buy expensive solutions. Today you can use the cloud service., and possessing minimal knowledge of machine learning, train your application and, using the API, recognize client requests and issue relevant answers.

Services for machine learning and working with big data continue to grow, and I think that demand for them will only grow, as they allow you to increase your competitive advantage with minimal investment.

High speed application

Parameters that are very important for a business are the speed of the web application and its usability. The most valuable thing people have is time, so try to make your applications and websites work quickly. Modern frameworks and technologies can significantly increase the speed of the web application.

If you want your application to be fast, you need to create a so-called single page application SPA (Single page application), which allows you to use the site without a full page reload. The quick work of the site and the feeling of the integrity of the application during the transition between sections increases customer loyalty and time of visiting the site.

There are two approaches for implementing single-page applications: with client rendering (CSR - client side rendering) and server rendering (SSR - server side rendering).

In the first case, to display and operate the web application, you first need to load the entire heavyweight application, and only then the mechanism for displaying the data page will start. This gives a delay in the display, in addition, we download the entire application as a whole, even if now we do not need the code to manage another section. Since the entire display of data on the page is generated by javascript in the browser, most search bots cannot read the information on the page and do not correctly index the pages, which affects the results in the search.

In the second case (SSR), the server prepares the page on its side, then gives the browser a ready-made page with data, and only then loads the main application, which hangs events and makes the page interactive. We immediately see the page with the data, search bots are happy. You can not download the entire application, and load it as needed.

Depending on the task, we in the company use both approaches. To implement server rendering we use Angular Universal or Next.js.

Content Management Services

For content management on the site for a long time used the classic CMS like Wordpress or Drupal. These systems still live and try to develop, but in their architecture and data processing they are outdated and by today's standards are very slow.

There is already a faster and more flexible alternative - Headless CMS, which allows you to use the same content for different platforms and is not tied to the site directly, but use the API interface. For content management, I would recommend using third-party popular cloud services like Contentful or Prismic, or the open source analogue of Strapi, which can be hosted on your hosting. Now they are the most popular and solve a wide range of tasks. For example, with their help, you can easily deploy a standard website with information, make a simple blog, service listings or product galleries. No need to search for plugins and think about storage, no need to raise the database and have your own hosting.

Conclusion

The world is changing very quickly, in order for businesses to remain competitive, you need to be aware of the latest technological innovations, come up with killer features and quickly implement them in your work. Technologies already allow for quite reasonable money to achieve good results: quickly test a hypothesis, create MVP using cloud solutions, and test it promptly. Even if the hypothesis does not work and the product does not work - you will save your time and money.