MailChimp is a great tool for creating email campaigns that engage consumers and drive traffic to your website. It also has a powerful template designer that allows you to create a custom design starting with a basic template. Here are step-by-step instructions on how to turn a simple layout into a great-looking design. Step 1: Creating a New Template Once…
For developers that deploy Rails with Capistrano, here are a few tasks to quickly open an interactive rails console or rails dbconsole on a remote server. If you’re like me, you’ll occasionally want to open a console to run a quick query, set an admin flag on a user or just verify that a migration worked correctly. This usually means…
It’s no longer necessary to create every feature that you want for your website. Now there are plenty of third party services to help you add some extra bells and whistles without spending much time at all. Third party companies, such as Olark, Boast, and Mailchimp, spend their time and money on offering a specific product and direct their focus…
“Do you think this is a good idea?” “Would anyone pay for this service?” “How much revenue will my new online product generate?” As a consulting company, our clients ask us questions like these all the time. Usually it’s after they’ve had a flash of inspiration about a brand new product or service idea. They have all this enthusiasm but…
There are millions of WordPress plugins for just about every function and need out there. But how do you know which ones are the best? I struggled with this question when I first started building WordPress websites. I wanted plugins that worked not only for me as a designer but were also easy for my clients to use in the…
In this two-part series, I’ll cover testing a Rails application—from how to get set up with the latest toolchain to writing those first tests. While it can be tricky to get everything playing nicely together, a solid test suite can be lifesaver down the road. In Part 1, I’ll look at how to set up and configure RSpec 3 (with…
There is nothing new about website image sliders but the way you interact with them has changed dramatically. A typical image slider usually includes a few basic controls, automatic slide transitions and the ability to cycle through slides via a pager. However, what happens when you try to interact with these sliders on a mobile phone? Or a tablet? There are…
Web Ascender is approached by local and international businesses to help them improve business processes and implement solutions to generate revenue. Our team has created a lot of mobile friendly web applications and actual native mobile applications over the years. When businesses approach us with a need, they don’t necessarily know how to approach or solve their problem. They sometimes…
Lately I’ve been writing a lot of code that deals with time—from time zones and scheduling tasks to scheduling tasks from different time zones. Time can be really tricky. It’s notoriously hard to debug and its gotchas are easy to overlook. Here are a few tips for writing and testing time-dependent code that I wish I could send back in…
Design trends on the web are constantly changing and evolving. Websites that were created just a few years ago quickly start to look dated compared to newer ones today. Making a few changes to the aesthetic of your site can make it feel modern and updated without involving a total website overhaul. We’ve collected a few tips to simply and…
