Saturday, December 31, 2022

Happy New Year!


We are looking forward to working with you in the coming year!

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




Sunday, December 25, 2022

**Award Winning** CGI 3D Animated Short Film "Hey Deer!" by Ors Barczy |...


Hey Deer! Short Animated Film about an adorable, cocoa-drinking deer who is eager to tidy and shoveling in front of his house every day. However, there is a suspicious earthquake every night which causes the mess day by day and make unbearable our fella’s life. Between two cups of cocoa the amazing truth reveals which changes the deer’s life forever…

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



Wednesday, December 21, 2022

How search engines see the web


If you want to make sure your website turns up in more search engine results, stay tuned for this video, which includes:

- how search engines understand what’s on a web page
- which parts of a web page help search engines do this
- how to make your web pages more visible to search engines.

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

Sunday, December 18, 2022

Web Typography

Web typography is the use of fonts on the World Wide Web. When HTML was first created, font faces and styles were controlled exclusively by the settings of each web browser. There was no mechanism for individual Web pages to control font display until Netscape introduced the font element in 1995, which was then standardized in the HTML 3.2 specification. However, the font specified by the font element had to be installed on the user's computer or a fallback font, such as a browser's default sans-serif or monospace font, would be used. The first Cascading Style Sheets specification was published in 1996 and provided the same capabilities.

The CSS2 specification was released in 1998 and attempted to improve the font selection process by adding font matching, synthesis and download. These techniques did not gain much use, and were removed in the CSS2.1 specification. However, Internet Explorer added support for the font downloading feature in version 4.0, released in 1997. 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 use of font downloading.

Read more, here.

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

Thursday, December 15, 2022

Advertising on social media


If you want to reach specific audiences online, advertising on social media sites is a great option. In this video we’ll talk about: 

- how to get your message in front of specific audiences
- how advertising on social networks can complement your other social efforts.

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

Friday, December 9, 2022

Occupations, Who Builds Websites?

There are two primary jobs involved in creating a website: the web designer and web developer, who often work closely together on a website. The web designers are responsible for the visual aspect, which includes the layout, coloring and typography of a web page. Web designers will also have a working knowledge of markup languages such as HTML and CSS, although the extent of their knowledge will differ from one web designer to another. Particularly in smaller organizations, one person will need the necessary skills for designing and programming the full web page, while larger organizations may have a web designer responsible for the visual aspect alone.

Further jobs which may become involved in the creation of a website include:

  • Graphic designers to create visuals for the site such as logos, layouts and buttons
  • Internet marketing specialists to help maintain web presence through strategic solutions on targeting viewers to the site, by using marketing and promotional techniques on the internet
  • SEO writers to research and recommend the correct words to be incorporated into a particular website and make the website more accessible and found on numerous search engines
  • Internet copywriter to create the written content of the page to appeal to the targeted viewers of the site
  • User experience (UX) designer incorporates aspects of user-focused design considerations which include information architecture, user-centered design, user testing, interaction design, and occasionally visual design.

Read more, here.

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

Tuesday, December 6, 2022

Setting your goals for social media


Once you’ve learned the lay of the land when it comes to social media, it’s time to figure out what you’re trying to accomplish. Let’s talk about: 

- setting specific goals for your social media efforts
- focusing your efforts on those goals
- putting your plan into action.

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

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.

--

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