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…
HTML5 is quickly becoming the go-to markup language for the web. One of the biggest improvements over it’s predecessor is in the way it manages media, specifically video. This <video> tag provides a simple way to quickly embed video on your site. <video width=”320″ height=”240″ controls> <source src=”movie.mp4″ type=”video/mp4″> <source src=”movie.ogg” type=”video/ogg”> Your browser does not support the video tag….
At Web Ascender we strive to build websites that everyone can enjoy. I have outlined some of the key components to building a highly accessible website. By following these guidelines even website visitors with disabilities will be able to enjoy your content, products and services. When I talk about accessibility, I am talking about creating a website or application that…
Accepting payments online through your website or mobile app is becoming more and more common. In fact, customers expect your business to provide an online payment option to purchase your products or services. Additionally, after submitting an online payment they expect immediate confirmation that it was successful, along with some indication their product is on its way or their service…
For one of our projects at Web Ascender we’ve had the interesting challenge of communicating with low-level hardware from our high-level Ruby on Rails application. The application needed to read binary data from UDP packets, convert the data to Ruby numbers, dates and strings, and then send a response. While one might normally reach for a more low-level language like…
Let’s be honest, you can most likely find a stock photo of some kind on every website out there today. These are the photos that are taken by professional photographers and contain professional models. The problem with these is that they rarely convey the emotion you may be trying to achieve as a business. Most of these photos come off…
WordPress provides a handful of great out-of-the-box widgets for you to use on your website. These widgets allow you to add new features and content directly into any available sidebar, giving you more power to create a unique, custom look. If you’ve ever tried working with the Text widget, you’ll know that it is one of the more basic widgets…
During the development process, it is important to run your web application’s test suite often to avoid any unforeseen issues and to make sure that everything is running smoothly. However, it can be hard to always remember to run the tests as you go, and not to mention, as your test suite gets larger, it takes longer and longer to run. This is…
