What makes the work of the web developer challenging and exciting at the same time are the ever-changing trends! With the exponentially increasing popularity of the mobile Internet surfing and the very strong  user base of the social media sites, the latest design and development trends seem to be heading towards functional, less busy, and with larger logos and image backgrounds web sites, which incorporate the latest Web development technologies as well. These are the top ten web development trends for 2011:

HTML5 – with most of the modern web browsers HTML5-ready, many web designers and developers were quick to spot the opportunities that the latest HTML revision offers. Amongst its exciting features are a number of new structural elements such as <nav>, <header>, <footer>, and <section>, a very simple to use and straightforward Video element, a flexible Canvas element, and Geolocation, which offers tremendous possibilities. The use of HTML5 and the lesser use of Flash seems to be a clear trend, which has started a number of years back and is still going strong.

Mobile-ready web sites; with the number of mobile users topping five billion and the popularity of the mobile Internet surfing growing, there is little surprise that designers and developers are creating web sites, which are slimmer, faster to load, and mobile-friendly. While in the past, most designer were creating mobile version of the exciting web site, the latest technologies and concepts such as responsive web design allow them to build pages that are easily viewed on a number of different devices, regardless of the screen size, resolution, or orientation.

CSS3

The latest version of the CSS technology has come with some new and exciting features such as box shadow, border images, border radius, multi-column layout, multiple backgrounds, text shadow, opacity setting, and font flexibility that allow designers and developers to create powerful and flexible layouts.

Server-side JavaScript

The use of server-side JavaScript; JavaScript has been purely client-based for a long time, but with the help of some new technologies such as node.js, the creation of more powerful and scalable, server-side JavaScript applications is now a real possibility.

Parallax Scrolling

A technique started back in the 80s, is now finding its way into the latest web designs. It creates the illusion of a 3-dimensional space and when used properly, it can give a web design an impressive depth.

Lifestreaming

Using social network aggregators in order to keep an electronic “diary” that allows users to track and follow the website’s owners movements on some of the top social media sites like Twitter, MySpace, and Facebook, is definitely becoming a trend.

Touch screen friendly designs

Since some desktop computers, all Smartphones, and many cell phones come with touch screens, the latest designs are slowly removing the mice-only friendly features such as hyperlink indicating and drop-down menus, and the designers are optimizing the web sites for fingertip navigation.

Better Security

It so no secret that the economic slowdown has caused a surge in the online fraud attempts, and the latest web development trends are clearly steering in the direction of better fraud prevention.

Photographic Backgrounds

While nothing new, photographic backgrounds are making a comeback with the use of high-resolution images that could give a stylish design a fresh and modern look.

Mobile Commerce

Also known as M-Commerce or mCommerce is the mobile version of e-commerce and allows users to shop on the go. It provides for instant purchases of ring tones, games, wallpapers, vouchers, coupons, and tickets as well as various information and subscription services.

There are great many trends that we left out, but are certainly well worth looking into and some of them are the increasing use of noSQL, the development of technologies that provide for easier deployment and scalability, JavaScript networks, and thumbnail and quick response (QR) design.