Homepage Design

Usability experts, including Jakob Nielsen and Kyle Soucy, have often emphasized homepage design for website success and asserted that the homepage is the most important page on a website. Nielsen, Jakob; Tahir, Marie (October 2001), Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed, New Riders Publishing. However practitioners into the 2000s were starting to find that a growing number of website traffic was bypassing the homepage, going directly to internal content pages through search engines, e-newsletters and RSS feeds. Leading many practitioners to argue that homepages are less important than most people think. Jared Spool argued in 2007 that a site's homepage was actually the least important page on a website.

In 2012 and 2013, carousels (also called 'sliders' and 'rotating banners') have become an extremely popular design element on homepages, often used to showcase featured or recent content in a confined space. Many practitioners argue that carousels are an ineffective design element and hurt a website's search engine optimization and usability.

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Set targets for your small business

Learn how to set targets for your small business and achieve them.

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Happy Thanksgiving.

Happy Thanksgiving from the team here at Upward Trend.

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Generated Content : Dynamic Websites

Dynamic websites are generated on the fly and use server-side technology to generate webpages. They typically extract their content from one or more back-end databases: some are database queries across a relational database to query a catalogue or to summarise numeric information, others may use a document database such as MongoDB or NoSQL to store larger units of content, such as blog posts or wiki articles.

In the design process, dynamic pages are often mocked-up or wireframed using static pages. The skillset needed to develop dynamic web pages is much broader than for a static pages, involving server-side and database coding as well as client-side interface design. Even medium-sized dynamic projects are thus almost always a team effort.

When dynamic web pages first developed, they were typically coded directly in languages such as Perl, PHP or ASP. Some of these, notably PHP and ASP, used a 'template' approach where a server-side page resembled the structure of the completed client-side page and data was inserted into places defined by 'tags'. This was a quicker means of development than coding in a purely procedural coding language such as Perl.

Both of these approaches have now been supplanted for many websites by higher-level application-focused tools such as content management systems. These build on top of general purpose coding platforms and assume that a website exists to offer content according to one of several well recognised models, such as a time-sequenced blog, a thematic magazine or news site, a wiki or a user forum. These tools make the implementation of such a site very easy, and a purely organisational and design-based task, without requiring any coding.

Editing the content itself (as well as the template page) can be done both by means of the site itself, and with the use of third-party software. The ability to edit all pages is provided only to a specific category of users (for example, administrators, or registered users). In some cases, anonymous users are allowed to edit certain web content, which is less frequent (for example, on forums - adding messages). An example of a site with an anonymous change is Wikipedia.

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Social media basics

Social media is everywhere, and people engage with it every day. Learn what it is and how you can take advantage of these networks by:

- understanding why you need to be there

- joining the right social media sites

- growing your presence and engaging with your networks.

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Client Highlight : Pazdel Chiropractic

Chiropractor

Suisun City CA

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Client since Nov 2014

Generated Content : Static Websites

A static website stores a unique file for every page of a static website. Each time that page is requested, the same content is returned. This content is created once, during the design of the website. It is usually manually authored, although some sites use an automated creation process, similar to a dynamic website, whose results are stored long-term as completed pages. These automatically created static sites became more popular around 2015, with generators such as Jekyll and Adobe Muse.

The benefits of a static website are that they were simpler to host, as their server only needed to serve static content, not execute server-side scripts. This required less server administration and had less chance of exposing security holes. They could also serve pages more quickly, on low-cost server hardware. These advantage became less important as cheap web hosting expanded to also offer dynamic features, and virtual servers offered high performance for short intervals at low cost.

Almost all websites have some static content, as supporting assets such as images and style sheets are usually static, even on a website with highly dynamic pages.

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Why you procrastinate even when it feels bad

Explore what happens in the brain to trigger procrastination, and what strategies you can use to break the cycle of this harmful practice.

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The report you’ve been putting off is due tomorrow. It’s time to buckle down, open your computer ... and check your phone. Maybe watch your favorite YouTube channel? Or maybe you should just start in the morning? This is the cycle of procrastination. So, why do we procrastinate when we know it’s bad for us? Explore how your body triggers a procrastination response, and how you can break the cycle.

Directed by Vitalii Nebelskyi, and action agency.

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Client Highlight : Bethany Lutheran Ministries

Church/School

Vacaville CA

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Client since Dec 2016

Skills and Techniques : Quality of code

Website designers may consider it to be good practice to conform to standards. This is usually done via a description specifying what the element is doing. Failure to conform to standards may not make a website unusable or error prone, but standards can relate to the correct layout of pages for readability as well making sure coded elements are closed appropriately. This includes errors in code, more organized layout for code, and making sure IDs and classes are identified properly. Poorly coded pages are sometimes colloquially called tag soup. Validating via W3C can only be done when a correct DOCTYPE declaration is made, which is used to highlight errors in code. The system identifies the errors and areas that do not conform to web design standards. This information can then be corrected by the user.

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Your email marketing options

Many email marketing software systems will guide you through the entire process of setting up an effective email campaign. You can monitor how recipients interact with your emails in order to personalise the content. In this video, you’ll learn about:

- common features of email marketing tools

- benefits of tracking email recipient behaviours

- personalising content according to customer information.

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Ryan Stone @ 707-480-0959 /or

Terry Minion @ 707-434-9967

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Client Highlight : Jon Edwards Salon & Spa Blog

Hair Salon

Vacaville CA

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Client since Oct 2019

Skills and Techniques : Motion graphics

The page layout and user interface may also be affected by the use of motion graphics. The choice of whether or not to use motion graphics may depend on the target market for the website. Motion graphics may be expected or at least better received with an entertainment-oriented website. However, a website target audience with a more serious or formal interest (such as business, community, or government) might find animations unnecessary and distracting if only for entertainment or decoration purposes. This doesn't mean that more serious content couldn't be enhanced with animated or video presentations that is relevant to the content. In either case, motion graphic design may make the difference between more effective visuals or distracting visuals.

Motion graphics that are not initiated by the site visitor can produce accessibility issues. The World Wide Web consortium accessibility standards require that site visitors be able to disable the animations.

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Your online goals

Taking your business online offers a lot of opportunities, but with so many options, it’s easy to spin your wheels and lose focus. Setting specific goals can help as you begin to navigate 

the digital world.

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Client Highlight : Connections For Life

Developmental Disability Assistance

Vacaville CA

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Client since Nov 2011

Skills and Techniques : Typography

Web designers may choose to limit the variety of website typefaces to only a few which are of a similar style, instead of using a wide range of typefaces or type styles. Most browsers recognize a specific number of safe fonts, which designers mainly use in order to avoid complications.

Font downloading was later included in the CSS3 fonts module and has since been implemented in Safari 3.1, Opera 10 and Mozilla Firefox 3.5. This has subsequently increased interest in web typography, as well as the usage of font downloading.

Most site layouts incorporate negative space to break the text up into paragraphs and also avoid center-aligned text.

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Website design do’s and don’ts

When designing your website, watch out for mistakes that often chase customers away. In this lesson, we’ll outline some ways to avoid frustration, such as:

- quick-loading pages

- mobile-friendliness

- general accessibility

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Client Highlight : American Pest Management

Pest Control Services

Eugene, OR

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Client since Feb 2017

Skills and Techniques : Page Layout

Part of the user interface design is affected by the quality of the page layout. For example, a designer may consider whether the site's page layout should remain consistent on different pages when designing the layout. Page pixel width may also be considered vital for aligning objects in the layout design. The most popular fixed-width websites generally have the same set width to match the current most popular browser window, at the current most popular screen resolution, on the current most popular monitor size. Most pages are also center-aligned for concerns of aesthetics on larger screens.

Fluid layouts increased in popularity around 2000 to allow the browser to make user-specific layout adjustments to fluid layouts based on the details of the reader's screen (window size, font size relative to window etc.). They grew as an alternative to HTML-table-based layouts and grid-based design in both page layout design principle and in coding technique, but were very slow to be adopted. This was due to considerations of screen reading devices and varying windows sizes which designers have no control over. Accordingly, a design may be broken down into units (sidebars, content blocks, embedded advertising areas, navigation areas) that are sent to the browser and which will be fitted into the display window by the browser, as best it can. Although such a display may often change the relative position of major content units, sidebars may be displaced below body text rather than to the side of it. This is a more flexible display than a hard-coded grid-based layout that doesn't fit the device window. In particular, the relative position of content blocks may change while leaving the content within the block unaffected. This also minimizes the user's need to horizontally scroll the page.

Responsive web design is a newer approach, based on CSS3, and a deeper level of per-device specification within the page's style sheet through an enhanced use of the CSS @media rule. In March 2018 Google announced they would be rolling out mobile-first indexing. Sites using responsive design are well placed to ensure they meet this new approach.

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Building your online presence

Let’s take a look at all the options for launching your business online, step by step. We’ll cover:

- local listings

- social media and video

- websites and mobile apps.

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