2024 Tools and Trends to Know for Design, Development, and Marketing

2023 has been a whirlwind with new tools and trends being introduced seemingly every day. Most notably, AI-powered technologies have grown rapidly for a variety of exciting new applications in web design, development, and marketing. Let’s dive in and discuss what you’ll need to know heading into the New Year!

 

 

Website Development Trends

In 2024, accessibility should be addressed for your websites. You want to make sure that as many people as possible can interact with your website and access your content no matter how they’re interacting with it, be it through a screen reader or their keyboard, or whatever device they might have.

There are some tools that we’ve been using to help enhance accessibility. One tool called Axe uses AI to scan websites. It tells you if an image doesn’t have an alt tag or if a particular link won’t be clear on a screen reader. Those things are going to be super helpful to know going into 2024 as you evaluate your website.

That leads into a mobile-first design and development strategy. That’s only going to continue to take off as more and more people view your websites on their phones or iPads as they’re on the go.

There’s also a number of AI tools that will help you solve certain development and coding problems. I’m not going to encourage anyone to say, “Hey, AI, make me a website,” but if you’re stuck on a for loop or something, AI can be super helpful to fix those kinds of problems that come up.

Also, CSS is in some sort of renaissance right now. Coding websites with CSS is much easier and more manageable.

 

2024 Website Design Trends and Tools

Many AI-centric web design tools are focused on imagery and videos for websites. When talking about AI-generated imagery for websites, there are a lot of things you can do with real photos.

For example, expanding the space around the edges of a photo, adding new elements to a photo, and removing elements from a photo. You can remove a person from the background of a photo in just a couple of seconds. Doing something like that would normally take a designer a few minutes. AI tools will be able to accomplish those same tasks more quickly.

100% AI-generated imagery is also expanding. There’s going to be a lot more developments in this next year to build upon the foundation of what they already have. There’s instances where a client requests a specific image, but there’s not a Stock image for it. In the future, using these AI-generated imagery tools, we can create these custom images and add them to websites instead of using a Stock photo that isn’t as relevant to the page’s subject matter.

There’s also a lot of really cool AI tools for videos. For example, AI allows you to quickly remove elements from a video, like a person walking through the background. This is very difficult to do when editing a video compared to a still image, so that’ll help save a lot of time in the future.

You can create basically any video and transform it into a green screen effect that removes the background entirely and replaces it with a different background. That can help save hours of time for even expert video editors.

 

Website Design Tools for Accessibility

There’s a lot of AI tools that are working in the world of accessibility as well:

• axe DevTools is a digital accessibility testing toolkit that we currently use on our website. It’s great for simplifying and streamlining the process of becoming accessible and compliant using an AI machine learning tool to scan the website for errors. Using this toolkit, developers can get feedback as they code to help catch accessibility errors before they make it to the page. It also lets you easily scan your website or even just part of a page to check for any accessibility issues and offer recommendations on how to resolve them.

 

• WAVE is a web accessibility evaluation tool for all aspects of the WCAG web guidelines. They focus on issues that impact end users, facilitate human evaluation, and educate about web accessibility.
• Google Lighthouse is a great tool for focusing specifically on page performance, but it also provides some useful audits for accessibility, progressive web apps, and search engine optimization (SEO).
• axe Auditor is a premium tool for streamlining accessibility testing. You can just plug in your URL and specific rules for testing and it’ll give you a report of any errors on your website. It also shows you what you’re doing right. It uses some AI features and focuses on making sure that websites are user-friendly for everyone.

These tools can help with SEO efforts as well because you want search engines to understand what’s on your website, the hierarchy of your heading tags, metadata, and so on.

 

Marketing and Business Development Tools

Tools that create some efficiency in content creation, photography, and videography will accelerate some of what used to take a long time to do as marketers. There’s going to be more time that can be spent on personalization and tasks that will make your content, videos, and photos more effective in converting audiences.

 

 

AI in general should really be looked at kind of as part of the digital transformation that companies need to do anyway. That’s why we have been talking a lot about CRMs.

It’s important to ensure that your data is in order because the AI and tools that you’re going to be using need that data to be able to do the personalization. I still see this resurgence of digital transformation in terms of what we can do to become better marketers, including implementing AI tools.

You don’t want to skim right past accessibility. That’s not only a trend but it’s really important. Everybody’s using different tools and different devices and needs to access things a certain way because of whatever disabilities they might have. The people who bring websites to life – designers, developers, and marketers – need to be cognizant of that and make sure that we’re continually thinking about it.

 

AI Tools for Social Media Marketing

Another great tool is Canva’s Magic Studio. It’s all powered by AI and it’s been really helpful for scheduling social media posts with engaging imagery.

It’s also been useful from a video editing standpoint as one of its features is an AI voiceover. You can type in the information that you want the voiceover to say, and then it’ll say it over the video. It sounds like a real human being. You can change the tone of the voice, the gender, and the speed at which the person speaks.

We also use Jasper AI to help with writing content. It’s awesome for inputting information about your business, your website, your About information, the industries you serve, the services you provide, and so on. It takes the information that you input and then it helps save hours and hours of time on drafting content, blogs, landing pages, conversion offers, etc. It streamlines that whole process.

 

Get Your Online Presence Ready for 2024

As we launch into another new year of innovation, staying at the forefront of the latest tools and trends will be critical in your efforts to deliver even more value to your clients and surpass competitors. If you’re feeling overwhelmed, our experts at BNP Engage are here to help! Contact us today to gain a trusted partner invested in your success.

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