Wednesday, November 30, 2022

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.

Read more, here.

TO LEARN MORE, CALL TODAY:
Ryan Stone @ 707-480-0959 /or
Terry Minion @ 707-434-9967

Sunday, November 27, 2022

Set targets for your small business


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

TO LEARN MORE, CALL TODAY:
Ryan Stone @ 707-480-0959 /or
Terry Minion @ 707-434-9967

Thursday, November 24, 2022

Happy Thanksgiving.


Happy Thanksgiving from the team here at Upward Trend.

TO LEARN MORE, CALL TODAY:
Ryan Stone @ 707-480-0959 /or
Terry Minion @ 707-434-9967



Monday, November 21, 2022

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.

Read more, here.

TO LEARN MORE, CALL TODAY:
Ryan Stone @ 707-480-0959 /or
Terry Minion @ 707-434-9967

Friday, November 18, 2022

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.

TO LEARN MORE, CALL TODAY:
Ryan Stone @ 707-480-0959 /or
Terry Minion @ 707-434-9967

Saturday, November 12, 2022

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.

Read more, here.

TO LEARN MORE, CALL TODAY:
Ryan Stone @ 707-480-0959 /or
Terry Minion @ 707-434-9967

Wednesday, November 9, 2022

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.

TO LEARN MORE, CALL TODAY:
Ryan Stone @ 707-480-0959 /or
Terry Minion @ 707-434-9967

Thursday, November 3, 2022

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.

Read more, here.

TO LEARN MORE, CALL TODAY:
Ryan Stone @ 707-480-0959 /or
Terry Minion @ 707-434-9967