The Digital World Has Come - Where Have You Been

The Net has been around for sometime but its popularity started a little more than ten years ago as more people gained access to the public domain. As more people engage in online activities such as MMORPG, internet surfing, chatting with relatives and friends, and stock investments, new ventures are formed and created.

Now we have small-to-large companies offering design, digital and web services. Aside from this, new types of professional were introduced such as digital/social producers, front-end developers, mobile developers, which were inconceivable a decade ago.

Yes, I can see that big question mark on your head. What sort of work do these new companies engage in? Web development is the convention used to refer to all the activities I mentioned about. Any digital production related to the creation of a website can be categorized under this term. Some digital professionals insists that web development is more on the horrors of putting in hundreds of lines of code to build the website’s functionality.

Web design services are involved with the layout of a website. Web design is the first thing people notice when they visit a page. And it is also considered as one of the key reasons to gain repeat visitors. There are four attributes of design: content, the usability, and the look-and-feel. The main goal of a good website designer is to make information readily available to his readers in a form that is very easy to understand and enticing.

SEO (no! it is not Spam Everything Online) services are basically a marketing strategy used by sites to get more traffic, or in laymen’s terms, to get people to visit their sites. Say for example a person goes to Google and types in SEO, they should be able to find sites relating to search engine optimization and the those sites at the top of the list has the highest page rank, meaning, these are the sites which is visited most often. There are other websites which are not indexed or listed in Google, MSN or Yahoo. This means that unless you know the website’s name, no one will get to visit that site. To make your site popular, you need to build links to your site, and this is what companies engaged in SEO does.

Now, let’s talk about something less technical. Did you know that more people are spending more time with the internet than watching TV, reading the papers and listening to the radio? For one, you can do all these three things while sitting in front of your laptop. Today you no longer need a subscription to the local paper due to having access to free content or for a small fee! There has been a tremendous increase in people doing their shopping online; you can do some insane and a lot of sane things in the internet. FYI, work is no longer confined to the office. When you need to beat a deadline, the internet gives best solution – bring your work home and let your remote-access services put you right back to work!

We have entered a new world – one where everything has its virtual counterpart. From the education, banking, dating industries, everything we need can be found in the internet. Looking at the other side of the coin, how has this digital world affected us, our family, our friends and our society in general today? In a recent research, it was described that internet usage was averaging at 8-10 hours a week while power users spend more than 15 hours in front of their computers and mobile devices. This has caused a disturbing decline in offline social activities. People are spending lesser hours talking to their friends or their families face-to-face. It is great that the world we live in has embraced the digital world of conveniences, and a world where people are losing contact with their social environment.

Where have you been?