Sales of tablet computers such as Apple iPad and its rivals will reach 26.5 million units, resulting in $14-billion in revenue, the Consumer Electronics Association said in a report released on Monday.

Smartphone sales will increase by 45 per cent to $23-billion, the study said.

Here, Mr. Silverton and Doug Morneau, founder and chief executive officer of Rhino Marketing in Vancouver, share their seven deadliest Web design sins and how you can avoid them.

Putting design before content
Designing without strategy
Getting too creative – or not creative enough
Burying contact info
Out-of-date information
Designing for you, not your audience
Forgetting about site structure and search engines

Search engine optimization (SEO) has its place too, experts agree. But what you don’t want is a site that is written entirely for that purpose. “Search engines don’t buy things, people do,” says Mr. Morneau. “You need to have the keywords that people are searching for, but you don’t need to repeat the fact that you’re a Vancouver design firm at every opportunity. As a user, that is annoying.”

Mr. Silverton agrees that SEO shouldn’t dictate design, but he suggests considering it in unison with design from the get-go. “Most companies believe SEO comes after site development, but then you’ll have to go back and make a lot of changes. It’s inefficient.”

Mobile payments are set to almost triple, from $240-billion (U.S.) to $670-billion, by 2015, according to a Juniper Research report released Tuesday. The bulk of mobile transactions, which could include buying movie tickets on smartphone applications or tapping a phone to buy coffee, will happen in North America, Western Europe, and East Asia.

Waterloo, Ont.-based Research In Motion Ltd., for example, announced in February that the next BlackBerry will have so-called near-field communication, a technology that allows users to tap their phone to make a purchase.

Both Google Inc. – in a partnership with MasterCard Inc., Citigroup Inc., First Data, and Sprint – and Visa Inc. announced in May separate “digital wallet” projects that are to launch later this year.

“Consumers and merchants are changing the way they buy and sell,” said Michael Bradley, head of products for Visa Canada.

He said Visa’s digital wallet means consumers won’t have to enter their credit card information every time they make an online purchase from a different merchant. “If it’s a pain in the neck [to enter your credit card number] when you’re shopping on the Internet, you can imagine how much of a pain it would be on a cellphone.”

By making it more convenient to pay with a mobile device, Visa hopes to expand its market share in the payment sector, Mr. Bradley said. Visa will explore partnerships with banks and cellphone providers to broaden the market, he added, pointing to a trial mobile payment system with Rogers Communications Inc. and the Royal Bank of Canada a few years ago.

What does this mean for web users? Well, besides the legacy ‘.com’ domain registered to over 94 million websites, and the 21 other generics and 250 country-specifics in existence like France’s .fr and the extremely popular .xxx, you can expect your online experience to open up to high-profile entertainment, consumer goods and financial services company-branded domains.

To register a generic top-level domain, or gTLD, brands must be an established private or public organization, prove their legitimacy to ICANN’s board – and shell out a cool $185,000.

What can you expect to see as registration opens? web3media.facebook; web3media.bieber, web3media.gaga…well, you get the idea.

Amazon has reached this milestone on other occasions since it started selling digital books in November of 2007: on Christmas Day in 2009, e-book sales outpaced physical sales for the day (due largely to people who had received Kindles as gifts shopping for their new devices.) And e-book sales have outstripped hardcover in the past as well. But every day since April 1, Amazon has sold 105 Kindle books for every 100 physical books, paperback and hardcover – suggesting the growth of digital book sales is now sustained.

“Customers are now choosing Kindle books more often than print books. We had high hopes that this would happen eventually, but we never imagined it would happen this quickly,” Amazon founder and chief executive officer Jeff Bezos said in a statement Thursday.

Amazon says that book sales, in both units and dollars, have grown this year for print and for digital – digital is up three times its levels year-to-date compared to one year ago.

Amazon also announced that its $114 Kindle edition – which is priced cheaper because users tolerate ads and other promotions on-screen – is now the bestselling version of the Kindle. (That edition is not available in Canada.)

Many analysts have suggested that for digital book sales to explode, e-readers must be priced lower than $100. Amazon could push digital book growth even further, Mr. Greco suggested, by offering subsidized Kindle devices with a commitment to spend a certain amount on e-books over a period of years, the way that telecom companies offer free or heavily discounted phones with a wireless contract.

“If someone could come up with [a contract-based] business model, they could revolutionize this business in six months. No kidding.”

Whether it’s a business owner, an entrepreneur in the making, a job seeker or a lifetime freelancer, all would do well to pay attention to how LinkedIn is changing the landscape for professionals on the Web. Google changed the way we treat information, Facebook is changing the way we treat each other and Groupon strives to change the way we treat commerce. LinkedIn, the social network for professionals, is changing the way we treat our businesses, our jobs and our livelihoods.

Part of the way that LinkedIn has helped to modernize the business world is by contributing to its mobilization. For companies on the Web, that means increased exposure from prospective clients, customers and talent by way of their mobile devices, putting a premium on those companies’ willingness to develop mobile-ready websites and applications. Whether it be utilizing the plethora of mobile apps available to business owners today or ensuring that a corporate website is fully functional for the mobile consumer, companies that neglect the mobile channel are missing vast opportunities. Businesses also have to consider the increasing mobile lifestyle of the workforce and their present and future employees by accepting the fact that freelance, contract and cloud-based employment is an increasingly significant trend.

LinkedIn has helped to connect businesses and professionals across the Web, and the enthusiasm with which the public has embraced its offering signifies the demand for such a network. It also represents a dramatic shift in the way businesses and professionals present themselves on the Web, and it introduces the beginning of the modern era of a highly social and mobile workforce.