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This is scary.  Exposing yourself to everyone to see.  That sounded bad didn’t it?  Well, this is my first attempt at building our web presence.  Our previous web site was created years ago by graphic designers and was in great need of updating.  I love the ease of using Rapidweaver and the NCD theme I used is great.  I know there are some tweaks I need to do yet but please let me know if you see anything wrong.  It may not be the fanciest sight around but I hope it gets the point across to our customers and any visitors that run across us.  Thanks for your input.

http://blazingfast.com

Nice job in general, and seems to work fine. A couple of things I noticed: as a printer, it’s important that your prospective clients are confident that you are well up on spelling, use of language and accuracy; in your ‘FAQs’ menu, you have an apostrophe that shouldn’t be there. You don’t even need the ‘s’ on the end because ‘FAQ’ stands for ‘Frequently asked questions’, so the ‘s’ is built in already! You could just have ‘FAQ’.

On your ‘News’ page, you have ‘Stop the Presses’ with three exclamation marks after it; the rule is that there should never, ever, be more than one; applies to anything like that, and questions marks. Again, it doesn’t send a good message to prospective clients. Hope you don’t mind me mentioning this.

Thanks for the input Paul.  Mainly I was doing the exclamations for extra effect but I may change it.  I will also change the ‘s on FAQ.  Sometimes when you are looking for bears you miss the ants.  I always appreciate insight because I am no expert at this and have little time to just play around with these fun things.

Old Dog - 15 July 2010 09:15 PM

Thanks for the input Paul.  Mainly I was doing the exclamations for extra effect but I may change it.

I urge you to do so, really. ‘Extra effect’ is always the reason people give for doing it, but it doesn’t give any; it just looks amateurish.

I will also change the ‘s on FAQ.  Sometimes when you are looking for bears you miss the ants.  I always appreciate insight because I am no expert at this and have little time to just play around with these fun things.

I’d lose the ‘s’ altogether; FAQ stands for Frequently Asked Questions, plural. So with the ‘s’ on the end, you are, in effect, saying ‘Frequently Asked Questionss’. It’s a bit like when people use the term ‘PIN number’ about their bank card; in the acronym ‘PIN’, the ‘N’ actually stands for ‘number’, so the erroneous term ‘PIN number’ is actually saying ‘Personal Identification Number Number’.

Sorry to be so fussy, but I believe this sort of thing matters, especially for a printer; your clients need to be assured that you’re not going to do this sort of thing on anything you print for them.

Paul Bradforth - 15 July 2010 10:24 PM

I’d lose the ‘s’ altogether; FAQ stands for Frequently Asked Questions, plural. So with the ‘s’ on the end, you are, in effect, saying ‘Frequently Asked Questionss’. It’s a bit like when people use the term ‘PIN number’ about their bank card; in the acronym ‘PIN’, the ‘N’ actually stands for ‘number’, so the erroneous term ‘PIN number’ is actually saying ‘Personal Identification Number Number’..

I’m going join you in the fussy end of the pond. I agree with you on PIN, but historically (USENET) FAQ meant Frequently Asked Question (singular) as well as Frequently Asked Questions (plural) so both usages were considered correct. See e.g.:

http://www.faqs.org/faqs/faqs/about-faqs/

The Chicago Manual of Style seems to prefer FAQ as the plural form, but the American Psychological Association prefers the FAQs usage. The following site is selling a product called CorrectEnglish, and uses FAQs:

http://www.correctenglish.com/faqs/

At least on this side of the pond, the FAQ vs FAQs question still seems to be moot.

Vasily

Vasily Ingogly - 15 July 2010 11:43 PM

At least on this side of the pond, the FAQ vs FAQs question still seems to be moot.

Vasily

As long as there’s no apostrophe …

I’d also sot out the page naming at the moment you have http://blazingfast.com/page8/page8.html something more descriptive would both help you visitor and look a lot better. This download from Ed’s site should help if you need it.

Regards

Mark

SnowHunter - 16 July 2010 01:52 PM

I’d also sot out the page naming at the moment you have http://blazingfast.com/page8/page8.html something more descriptive would both help you visitor and look a lot better. This download from Ed’s site should help if you need it.


Regards

Mark

+1. In the page inspector give your page a descriptive name such as “sevices.html”. Then for the folder just put"/" so that when it shows up in the location part in your browser it’ll read “www.blazingfast.com/services.html”, etc.

Also, on my computer using Firefox the home page has some weird type sizing/spacing problem. It looks kind of pushed together on the top half. I’ve included a screen shot. Not sure if it’s only me that sees it like this. I looked at it in Safari and Chrome and it looks fine. I checked my settings in Firefox and they’re set to use the web site’s default font settings plus I’ve never seen this before so I thought it worth mentioning.

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daveyboy - 16 July 2010 04:12 PM

Also, on my computer using Firefox the home page has some weird type sizing/spacing problem. It looks kind of pushed together on the top half.

Me too. I had a look with Firebug and found an odd span style:

element.style {
color:#FFFFFF;
font:14.4px/0.9em Trebuchet,Verdana,serif;

The /0.9em part is line-height, which is why it’s all scrunched up. The font size for the ‘normal’ bit is 16px, so it’s a different size too. Also, it’s odd to see ‘Trebuchet, Verdana, serif’ there; it should be ‘Trebuchet, Verdana, sans-serif’.

Sumpn’ funny going on there ...

Select the text and choose “clear formatting” form the format menu. That might fix it.

Wow, thanks for all the great input.  I didn’t think anyone would even look at it.  I’ll check into all of these issues you’ve all pointed out as soon as I can.  The problem is I’m am a working owner and am constantly answering questions, trying to get some work done, on the phone or fixing computer problems for others.  It took me some time to get the page ready to upload then several more weeks to fix problems I saw on that upload.  There are a few other things I have seen I need to fix.  One is the times we are open at the top of each page in the banner area.  I will either have to move our logo up or the hours down.  I think I may get into edit the code to fix this but am not sure how yet. 

Also I was wondering what anyone thought about the silly trivia I put in the sidebar area.  The reason I put it there was to hopefully get people to read them and then stay with our page long enough to learn more about us.

Again, I appreciate this forum and all the talented people giving their valuable insight to others.  And I promise I will fix the problems as soon as I can.

daveyboy - 16 July 2010 04:12 PM

Also, on my computer using Firefox the home page has some weird type sizing/spacing problem. It looks kind of pushed together on the top half.

The font problem is related to the emphasis you’ve added to the word unseen, and the spans that Blocks is generating to create the emphasis. I’d start by removing the single quotes surrounding the word ... I suspect you’re using them for emphasis, which as the following page points out is incorrect usage:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_mark

Vasily

Old Dog - 17 July 2010 04:07 AM

Also I was wondering what anyone thought about the silly trivia I put in the sidebar area.  The reason I put it there was to hopefully get people to read them and then stay with our page long enough to learn more about us.

People who are searching for a product or service are focused on an end result. The trivia is a distraction, the equivalent of a used car salesman showing you pictures of his family and more likely to stir up resentment than keep someone reading the page. Your visitors’ time is valuable to them. If you want to use interesting facts in the sidebar, provide visitors with stuff that’s related to the reason they’re on your site: think marketing.

Vasily