Firstly, I thought I would take this opportunity to thank all our customers, suppliers & friends for their continued support throughout the year.

It’s been a good year for the team at Artsgraphica but it wouldn’t have been possible without your help so thanks a lot!

So what are our online business predictions for 2010?

Unfortunately, we can’t predict the lottery but we can give you some ideas of what we think will be hot in ecommerce web design in 2010.

1. Twitter & the real-time web

The rise of Twitter and its effect on search engines is likely to continue through 2010. Expect to see improvements in real-time search results as the major players like Facebook, Bing & Google try to get in on the real-time market. At the moment, real time search results in Google are bad to say the least so expect to see continuing revisions in this area. Even if you aren’t in a sector that demands real-time then you can’t ignore Twitter as where last year people blogged about you and your products in 500 words, this year they will tweet about you in just 140 characters. That can’t be a good thing can it?

2. The year of Mobile

Every year I go to a web design conference and at least one speaker declares that next year ‘Will be the year of the Mobile Web”. I was on the way to @Media 2007 and decided I would check the train times from Kings Cross and I got ringtones with ‘Kings Cross’ in the title on my Nokia. Hardly, the mobile web I was looking for.

But things have changed, the iPhone is here (and available in Tesco) and through things like the App Store, the mobile networks have found another way to make money rather than selling ringtones. So will 2010 be the year of mobile? Probably not, but I would start to think about where your website visitors are viewing your website from. In 2010 we can’t assume they are sat at a computer in the office or at home.

3. Pay walls, monthly subscriptions & pay per play

I would expect that we shall see a number of major newspapers implementing ‘paywalls’ on their online content in 2010. Its going to be bumpy ride as some websites price themselves out of the market and others gain traffic (and advertising revenue) from visitors leaving pay-for websites. Micropayments is the buzz word here but as no one has really got this figured out then we might be looking at monthly subscriptions for as little as £2/month to access online versions of popular newspapers.

The thing they might be missing is that World of Warcraft has over 10 million monthly subscribers and that people seem more willing to spend money pretending to be orks or elves than reading the New York Times. I would expect to see more social media games break out from Facebook and into the web at large. Expect lots of free public beta versions with monthly subscriptions just around the corner. If someone could just work out a way to make a World of Facebook then they would make a fortune.

4. Price comparision & money saving online

With households & businesses dealing with rising unemployment then I expect to see the continuing growth of money saving websites. Even if you aren’t looking to renew your car insurance you can now find ways to save money on almost anything online. If you are running an ecommerce business and you are not tapping into this market then you are really missing out.

Sure, you don’t always want to be directly judged on price so price comparisons might not be for every ecommerce site, instead think about developing some really good offers, promo codes and vouchers and using this growing network of money saving websites to gain you some traffic. Some ecommerce traders might still view social media as a dirty word but maybe it’s time to look at money saving and online review websites in a different light?