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…
Re-branding can be an intimidating process for major businesses that have an established consumer base, especially when those changes involve updates to a company’s logo. Despite the risk of distancing loyal customers, many major companies have undergone successful re-branding throughout the last few decades. However, some logo evolutions include designs that never should have happened. The Arby’s logo is a prime example of…
Like a lot of designers, I sometimes struggle to find inspiration for new projects. Fortunately, there are a lot of tools out there to help designers get inspired. Finding the right go-to site can sometime be a challenge, so I’ve put together a list of my favorite sites to reference to help you get your creative juices flowing. Design…
Finding the perfect image to use for a blog post, newsletter, website design or flyer can pose it’s challenges, especially when the images you want to use are too small for your design. Here I’ve put together some simple tricks you can use to make your images look great and work for whatever project you’re working on. What do…
Building a website is a huge task, which can often take hundreds of hours dedicated to design, content and development. Once the site launches, the difficult task of keeping the site up-to-date begins. While a bulk of the work may be complete, continuing work must be done to ensure the website remains up-to-date with its design, features and technology. Updating…
Have you ever typed into a search box and seen result suggestions appear before your very eyes? It’s pretty handy, right? Sites like Google, Amazon, Ebay, and Apple all use this feature within their website. It’s called “live search” or sometimes “autocomplete.” Today, I’d like to focus on a plugin I recently discovered which adds this functionality to your WordPress…
Have a great idea for a new internet startup? Think you can revolutionize an industry if you made the perfect app? Don’t start with designing and building your application, start with selling it. Why? Here are two scenarios to consider. Scenario 1: Mario has a great idea for a web application that will give plumbers an easy way to track…
